The Future of War

Yesterday, I heard a RadioLab show featuring a survey question that journalist and teacher John Horgan has been asking people: will humans ever permanently stop fighting wars?

Horgan believes the answer is yes, even though the great majority of his survey respondents disagree. I have to disagree too. It seems to me that the answer arises from a game theoretical approach.

The higher the percentage of humans who stop fighting wars, the more advantage, I would think, would accrue to those who are prepared to keep fighting them. If 95% of humanity gives up war, the remaining militaristic 5% would have a big edge.

Will the 95% forever keep a standing army big enough to deter fighting from the remaining 5%? And never use it? Hard to believe.

Death Penalty

John Allen Muhammad, also known as the D.C. Sniper, was executed yesterday. I have to say that I don't particularly care.

On the one hand, there are certainly some good arguments against the death penalty. Most notably, there is the disturbing possibility that it results in the execution of the innocent. Given the number of innocent people convicted of crimes, it seems likely that at least some innocent people get executed. Execution is also very expensive -- the death penalty can add hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to the cost of a case, and it could be difficult to reduce that amount substantially without increasing the risk of an incorrect result. (There's an argument that should appeal to conservatives -- instead of arguing the injustice or immorality of the death penalty, its opponents should try to portray the death penalty as just another big, expensive, mistake-filled government program.) I wouldn't have been bothered to learn that Muhammed got a life sentence; I don't feel some strong need to have him die.

On the other hand, I have always felt that the amount of attention and opposition the dealth penalty receives is excessive, particularly in relation to the number of people it affects. In the entire period from 1976 to 2005, 1000 people were executed in the United States. That's about 33 people per year. Meanwhile, car accidents kill over 40,000 people per year, and tobacco kills over 400,000 people per year -- in the United States. Yes, death penalty deaths are different in character, but in the grand scheme of things, I think activists might do better to devote their time and energies to a cause that affects more people.

And in any event, if we are going to have the death penalty, it seems that Muhammed is the kind of person who should get it. There didn't seem to be any doubt about his guilt, and his crime involved terrorizing society and killing multiple people for monetary reasons. So while I wasn't feeling a strong need for him to die, neither do I find it especially disturbing.

Course Evaluations

My faculty voted on Friday to change the course evaluation form that we ask students to fill out. It's a small thing, but that didn't stop us from debating it for nearly two hours.

The length of the debate partly reflects our idiosyncratic love of long meetings -- we seem to have a Law of Conservation of Meeting Length, so that we find something to discuss regardless of the actual magnitude of a proposal's importance -- but it also reflects the fact that, although a change in the course evaluation form may seem trivial, it can actually have subtle and important implications.

For example, we voted to ask students to rate professors on their "ability to present the subject matter in a clear and organized manner." That seems pretty straightfoward, and it won't bother me, because the students have always regarded my teaching style as clear and organized. But what if a professor believes that the essence of the Socratic method is to revel in the ambiguities of the subject matter and to require the students to figure out the answers for themselves, with no clear guidance from the instructor? I can certainly remember professors who ran their classes that way. (Although I may be giving them too much credit for thinking about their teaching styles -- perhaps they were just intrinsically unclear and disorganized). They will be disadvantaged.

Also, we deleted an inquiry about the professor's "enthusiasm." That seems to me to be an important component of good teaching. I was sorry to see that one go.

So while it might hardly seem worth debating, the centralized choice of the specification of the components of good teaching actually has subtle but important impacts on academic freedom. Maybe our debate was worth it after all.

Another Guest Slot

Having come off my guest appearnce at Concurring Opinions, I'll be spending this month guesting at PrawfsBlawg. Faithful readers can follow me here or there.

Counting Up

Republican Senator David Vitter proposes that the U.S. Census should count citizens only. Traditionally, the census counts all persons living in the U.S., whether they are citizens or not. Because the census is used to apportion the House of Representatives, Vitter's proposed change in practice would have a marked impact on the makeup of the House. States with substantial noncitizen populations (most notably California) would lose; other states would gain.

Vitter says that counting noncitizens would "strip these states [the ones that would stand to gain from his proposal] of their proper representation in Congress." You might think that Vitter would avoid references to stripping, but that's another story.

I have to confess that my first reaction was surprise that the census traditionally counts noncitizens for apportionment purposes. Of course we want to have the count of everybody, because that's important information for a lot of purposes, but the main purpose of the census is to apportion the House, and for that purpose my first instinct was that only citizens would count. After all, shouldn't the size of a state's congressional representation depend on how many actual voters a state has? If two states each have 1,000,000 citizens, but one of them has an additional 250,000 noncitizens who can't vote, don't we really care about the voting populations?

But on further reflection, the matter isn't quite so simple. If you think about it, Senators and Representatives represent a whole lot of people who can't vote. Children can't vote, but no one would suggest leaving them out of the census, even though including them disadvantages states with disproportionately adult, and therefore voting, populations (Florida?). In some states, convicted felons can't vote, but they count in the census too.

You might say that these examples don't carry over to noncitizens because at least children will someday be able to vote, whereas noncitizens will never be able to vote. But in fact many noncitizens will be able to vote someday -- a lot of them are legal permanent residents who are working their way toward citizenship, and therefore toward voting rights. Even illegal immigrants might be able to vote someday if Congress regularizes their status.

So, given that all politicians represent lots of people who can't vote, and given that many noncitizens will, like citizen children, be able to vote some day, I conclude, in the end, that counting everybody makes sense. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's constitutionally required. The Constitution says that the census shall be conducted in such manner as the Congress may direct, and I could see a rational basis for Congress to conclude that only eligible voters, or perhaps even only citizens, should count for apportionment purposes. But on balance the traditional practice of counting everybody seems correct.

Lost in Space

The bizarro story of the week was two pilots on a commercial airplan overshooting Minneapolis airport by 150 miles before turning around and landing safely. They were out of touch with ground control for over an hour.

What gets me is this: ground control tried numerous times to contact the pilots, including sending them text messages, but were unable to get their attention. Putting aside the question of what happened -- whether the pilots were asleep or distracted by an argument or just doing something innocuous that they can't go into -- why doesn't ground control have the ability to make a really loud noise in the cockpit? There's something in the cockpit that says "TRAFFIC!" loudly when the plane gets too near another plane. Why doesn't ground control have a button they can press to say "HEY DUMMIES, PAY ATTENTION TO US!" when necessary?

Disturbances in the Blogosphere

The FTC recently churned up the blogosphere by releasing new “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” that indicate that bloggers — bloggers! — have a duty clearly and conspicuously to disclose whether they have a “connection,” such as the receipt of free product, with the makers of products that they endorse. (See particularly section 255.5, Example 7.) We thought that we were just posting stuff on our blogs, but suddenly it’s a federal matter.

Like most bloggers, I believe in freedom to blog, but I have to say I think the FTC has a point. The FTC’s statutory mandate is to stamp out “unfair methods of competition . . . , and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” This venerable proscription should apply to new media as well as to old. The Internet is new and cool, but deception over the Internet is still deception. Deception on a blog is still deception.

If you’re representing yourself as a source of unbiased information about consumer products but (to take the simplest case) you’re actually getting paid by someone to say something nice about their products, there’s some deception going on. Whether it’s deceptive not to reveal that you’re reviewing a product that you received for free because you’re known to be an influential reviewer is a closer question. I expect magazine reviewers get free stuff all the time, but they don’t necessarily reveal it conspicuously, precisely because it’s already keyed into our assumptions. If the proscription against deception carries over to new media, the assumptions that mitigate deception should carry over too. So it’s ultimately a question of fact whether people assume bloggers get free stuff. But the basic point that it should be as unlawful to use a blog to deceive as to use anything else for that purpose is sound.

Also churning up the blogosphere is the opposite trend — the consumer use of blogs and other Internet avenues to say not-so-nice things about products and services they received. Usually big corporations have an edge in battles with consumers, but the Internet levels the playing field somewhat in this regard — the manufacturers and service providers have to be concerned about the ability of one dissatisfied consumer to communicate the problem to millions.

Let me join both trends at once. I recently redid my kitchen, and got all-new KitchenAid appliances. I’m sensitive to noise, so I carefully investigated the noise levels of the refrigerator and dishwasher, and they’ve turned out great. (FTC-Recommended Full Disclosure: I didn’t get a dime for saying that but I would be happy to accept an appropriate fee. KitchenAid, call my agent.)

But the oven! Would it even occur to you to check whether an oven might make too much noise, or, indeed, any noise at all? Well, my consumer friend, I want you to know that if you’re thinking of buying a KitchenAid range, you’d better check into it. Every time you switch on the oven (on my model at least), a fan comes on — quite a noisy fan, too, in my (admittedly sensitive) estimation. And it stays on the whole time you’re cooking. The purpose of this fan, I learned from a quite unapologetic KitchenAid representative, is just to cool the range’s electronic instrument panel. There’s progress for you — first they install a souped-up electronic panel you don’t really need (what was wrong with knobs, exactly?), and then they have to add a noisy fan so the panel won’t overheat.

The range had to go. I knew I couldn’t live with that fan noise, so I set out on a search for a range with a quiet oven. But it turns out to be impossible to search, because you can’t listen to ovens in stores — they’re not connected up. And they’re not rated for noise either. There’s no way to tell whether an oven is noisy short of buying it and installing it. After calling every appliance store for 50 miles around, I finally found a knowledgeable salesman who recommended GE Profile, and (after spending just a few hundred bucks to get the countertop reconfigured) I got a GE Profile Double Oven, which, thank goodness, is much, much quieter. So that’s what I recommend.

And I didn’t get a dime for saying that either.