Grading for Class Participation: A Moral Issue

It is common for professors to base a student's grade in part on the degree to which he participates in class discussion. This policy seems to me to raise serious moral issues. The grades I give my students purport to measure how much of what is taught in the class they know. By giving a higher grade to those who participate more I am bribing them to help me to teach the class. To put the point more strongly, I am getting them to help me by offering to lie to their future employers about them, to overstate how much they learned as a reward for their assistance.

This objection would not apply if I were using their classroom participation merely as evidence of how much they had learned, grading them up for participation that provided positive evidence, down for participation that provided negative evidence. But that is not what professors who give credit for class participation do, or say they do.

Climate Complications

Freeman Dyson has an interesting essay on heresy, global warming and much else. He argues that we don't know nearly enough to predict what will happen to climate, what the human contribution to climate change is, or whether likely changes are on net good or bad. In particular, we do not understand the biological part of the equation very well--the effect of increases in CO2 or changes in human land use on the amount of carbon tied up in topsoil.

When I point out how small the predicted effects are of global warming--a few degrees increase in temperature and a foot or so in sea level over the next century--a common response is that the average effects understate the costs. Dyson implies the opposite conclusion:

In humid air, the effect of carbon dioxide on radiation transport is unimportant because the transport of thermal radiation is already blocked by the much larger greenhouse effect of water vapor. The effect of carbon dioxide is important where the air is dry, and air is usually dry only where it is cold. Hot desert air may feel dry but often contains a lot of water vapor. The warming effect of carbon dioxide is strongest where air is cold and dry, mainly in the arctic rather than in the tropics, mainly in mountainous regions rather than in lowlands, mainly in winter rather than in summer, and mainly at night rather than in daytime. The warming is real, but it is mostly making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter. To represent this local warming by a global average is misleading.

One of the best bits of the essay deals not with global warming but with the tension between "naturalist" and "humanist" views of the world:

Here I must confess my own bias. Since I was born and brought up in England, I spent my formative years in a land with great beauty and a rich ecology which is almost entirely man-made. The natural ecology of England was uninterrupted and rather boring forest. Humans replaced the forest with an artificial landscape of grassland and moorland, fields and farms, with a much richer variety of plant and animal species. Quite recently, only about a thousand years ago, we introduced rabbits, a non-native species which had a profound effect on the ecology. Rabbits opened glades in the forest where flowering plants now flourish. There is no wilderness in England, and yet there is plenty of room for wild-flowers and birds and butterflies as well as a high density of humans. Perhaps that is why I am a humanist.

Affirmative Action, Richard Sanders and Thomas Sowell

A recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal discusses research by Richard Sanders suggesting that affirmative action by law schools actually reduces the number of black lawyers. The argument, and the evidence, is elegant and persuasive. If you classify law students by academic credentials and what tier law school they go to, black students and white students have about the same bar passage rate--a black who goes to (say) a second tier law school is about as likely to pass the bar as a white at a similar law school with similar academic credentials. But if you classify students only by academic credentials, blacks have a much lower bar passage rate than whites.

Sanders' explanation is a mismatch between students and schools. Black students do not, on average, end up in the same law schools as white students with the same credentials. Law schools compete to get black students, there aren't enough well qualified ones, so elite schools accept black students with qualifications well below those they require for white students. The result is that many black students end up in schools and classes they are not qualified for, learn little, and fail to pass the bar--students who would have done better in a less elite school designed for students more like them. He estimates that a race blind admission policy would result in fewer black students going to law school but more passing the bar.

After reading the op-ed, I told my wife about it. She pointed out that the argument was not original with Sanders. Almost twenty years ago, in his very interesting Choosing a College: A Guide for Parents and Students, Thomas Sowell made precisely the same point in the context of colleges rather than law schools. Black students at MIT had math scores well above the national average but far below the average for white students at MIT; they would have gotten a better education at a less elite engineering school.

Do Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton Read This Blog?

Back in December of 2005, I suggested that, in order to win over libertarian voters, “At the very least, prominent Democrats should come out in favor of the federal government respecting state medical marijuana laws, as it has so far refused to do.”

According to Reason’s Hit and Run Blog, “Barack Obama has joined the seven other Democratic presidential candidates in promising to call off the DEA's medical marijuana raids if he's elected.”

Nice to know someone was listening.

Internet in Hotels—a Puzzle

In my experience, low and medium priced hotels/motels usually provide a free internet connection, high priced ones usually charge for it. This seems to be true not only in the U.S. but in Europe as well, although that conclusion is based on less data—one fancy hotel in Helsinki, one each less fancy in London and Paris.

Does the pattern hold in general? If so, why? The obvious guess is that it has something to do with price discrimination, but I'm not sure just why it makes more sense to price discriminate against internet users in expensive hotels than in inexpensive ones.

Low Cost Cooling

A common hot weather strategy, especially for people living in big old houses without air conditioning, is to open windows at night when it is cool out, close them in the morning.

It should be straightforward to automate the procedure, using windows or vents that can be set to open when the temperature outside is cooler than the temperature inside, close when it is warmer, with fans to increase the airflow when desired. I would expect both the capital cost and the operating cost of such a system, used to replace or supplement air conditioning, to be trivial relative to the cost of air conditioning itself.

Yet I do not think I have ever seen such a system. Have I missed it? Or is there some non-obvious problem with the idea?

[The reason I have not been posting is that I've been travelling].

My novel as podcasts

Last spring Harald, my first novel, was published by Baen. One friend who had heard me doing oral storytelling in the SCA commented that it read better if he imagined it in my storytelling voice. So, through the marvels of modern technology and the cooperation of my publisher ... .

The first section of Harald, the prologue and the first nine chapters, read by me, is now available as podcasts. Comments are welcome; I've done a lot of oral storytelling but this is my first venture into doing it online and I don't know how well it works. If people like it I'll do some more of it.

Income and Human Mating Patterns

I've been reading Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, which seems to be a good popular presentation of evolutionary psychology. Two points occurred to me.

1. Wright argues that monogamy tends to be associated with societies that are either very poor, so a man cannot support two families, or have fairly even income distributions, so that half of one man is almost always worth less than all of another from the woman's standpoint.

It occurs to me that the first point is also relevant to women's choice between their two alternative mating strategies, long term and short term. The long term strategy is to pair up with the most desirable man she can get and jointly produce and rear children. The short term strategy is to get pregnant by the most desirable man she can and then rear the child herself. There seems to be good evidence that both women and men are equipped for their roles in both strategies, with different preferences among potential mates according to which is being followed.

In a very poor society, the short term strategy is not viable because a woman cannot afford to bring up a child by herself–it's long term or nothing. So we would expect that rising incomes would be associated with an increasing number of women choosing the short term strategy. That, allowing for substantial time lags in social institutions, might help explain the large changes in observed behavior in developed societies over the past fifty years ago.

2. Wright cites anthropological evidence that dowry, payments by the bride's family to the groom, is almost always associated with socially enforced monogamy. His explanation is that without enforced monogamy, the very desirable--most obviously the wealthy--man can trade half of himself for all of a bride. If he can't do that, he trades all of himself for all of a bride plus some cash. (My summary of Wright's analysis, not his)

I think he is missing something. As I argued long ago in my Price Theory chapter on love and marriage, polygyny, by letting some men bid for more than one wife, bids up the price of a wife on the marriage market. If women own themselves the result is more favorable terms in marriage. If their husbands own them the result is higher bride price or lower dowry, since a dowry (ignoring lots of complications) is a negative bride price. Enforced monogamy lowers the price of a wife not merely to the man who would otherwise have had two wives but to all men, hence makes bride price less likely and dowry more likely.

More Help Need: Louis Freeh's half hour

I'm trying to source a statement I make in the book I'm finishing up, but I don't remember where I saw it. It's something by Louis Freeh, back when he was the director of the FBI, to the effect that what they really needed was the ability to decrypt any message in half an hour.

Does any reader of this blog know if I am remembering correctly, and if so have a source for the quote?

Loaded Dice: Professor Altemeyer's response

Some time back, I had a post taking issue with research on "right wing authoritarianism" by Robert Altemeyer contained in a webbed book of his. Eventually someone called Professor Altemeyer's attention to the post and he responded in a comment. Since people are unlikely to notice an exchange in the comment section of an old post, I'm shifting the discussion to a new one.

My central complaint was that he had first defined RWA in a fashion that purported to be politically neutral, with "right wing" having to do with attitude to established authority not with whether one voted for Republicans or Democrats, and then biased his test in a way that would consistently make individuals on the political right look more authoritarian than they were and individuals on the left look less. I don't think his response adequately deals with that complaint, but perhaps if I explain why he can show me that I am mistaken.

To quote from my previous post, describing the 20 questions on whose answers Professor Altemeyer based his measure of how right wing authoritarian the responder was:

What is almost immediately obvious if you read the questions is that they aren't testing for RWA as the author defines it but for a combination of that and right/left political views. When the question is of the form "people who campaigned for unpopular causes X, Y and Z were good," X, Y and Z just happen to be causes more popular on the left than on the right. When the question is of the form "We should follow authority X," X just happens to be a source of authority, such as the church, more popular on the right than on the left. No questions about people who campaigned for unpopular right wing causes or about deferring to sources of authority popular on the left.

Professor Altemeyer responds:

"When one is measuring submission to established authority in a society, one has to mention those authorities, their views, etc. in the items."

That, of course, is true. But it doesn't answer my objection, which is about the particular authorities you selected. As I pointed out in the longer discussion in the Usenet thread, one could easily enough replace your questions with others in which the authority was one popular with the left and unpopular on the right, or the unpopular cause one popular on the right and not the left.

Suppose, for instance, that one of the questions asked whether a worker should be willing to cross a picket line and go to work if he disagreed with the decision to call a strike. Labor unions are established authorities, so someone who disagrees is demonstrating RWA as the book defines it. But I predict that that question would have shown people on the left more RWA and people on the right less than the corresponding question you used.

Similarly, if instead of asking how the responder felt about "those who challenged the law and the majority's view by protesting for women's abortion rights, for animal rights, or to abolish school prayer" you asked about those who challenged the law and the majority view by picketing abortion clinics--abortion is, after all, legal, and has been for decades--or about those who challenged the majority view by home schooling their children in order to give them a proper religious education, you would have gotten a rather different pattern of responses.

My complaint isn't that you are not measuring authoritarianism--I'm a libertarian, and I indeed came out with a fairly low score on the test. It is that you are measuring a combination of authoritarianism and right wing political beliefs. Given the bias built into your test, if a right winger and a left winger are equally authoritarian, the right winger will get a higher score. That is a fatal fault in a test which you use to justify the claim:

"In North America people who submit to the established authorities to extraordinary degrees often turn out to be political conservatives,"

You can't justify such a claim using a test which is in part testing for political conservatism.

Professor Altemeyer in his response points me at footnote 7, which deals with ambiguity and bias in the questions. So far as I can tell, it is irrelevant to my point. If his test produces a score which is, say, .6 a measure of authoritarianism and .4 a measure of political belief, the results could be internally consistent and still produce a biased result. That would be less true if my criticism applied to only a few questions, since answers on them would correlate poorly with answers on the rest of the test. But in fact, as I point out in the Usenet thread, a majority of the twenty questions are politically biased, measure political beliefs as well as authoritarianism. He has come up with an internally consistent set of questions, all right, but they are measuring the wrong thing. Indeed, given that he was discarding questions that didn't correlate well with the rest of the test, if he had put in one of mine (see below) where the political bias was reversed, he would have concluded that it was a bad question and discarded it.

Let me try to put a series of questions to Professor Altemeyer, to see if we can identify what we disagree about:

1. Is it true that, in defining "right wing authoritarianism," you claim that you are not using "right wing" in a political sense?

2. Is it true that, in your list of questions, the authorities you choose to test submission to are consistently authorities more popular with the right than the left and the anti-authoritarian causes you test approval of are consistently ones more popular with the left than the right–so consistently that there is not a single question that goes the other way?

3. Do you agree that such a set of questions will consistently show a higher level of RWA for people on the right than for people on the left, actual degree of authoritarianism held constant?

4. Do you agree that if all the above points are correct, your results cannot justify your conclusion that people on the right are more authoritarian than people on the left?

For your entertainment, here is a list of alternative questions that one would use to replace some of yours if one wished to reverse the political bias; it's from one of my usenet posts in the thread on this subject.

23: When a union calls a strike, workers should decide for themselves whether it is justified and cross picket lines to go to work if they think it is not.

24. Our country desperately needs a decisive leader who will overcome special interest politics and break the political power of big corporations in order to do what is good for the common people.

25. Fundamentalist Christians are just as healthy and moral as anybody else.

(Incidentally, the original of that, with "gays and lesbians," is another question where someone who actually thinks about it clearly will give just the opposite of the pattern the author assumes. Gays are not just as healthy as the rest of us--they have a much higher rate of AIDS. So "strongly agree" on that question means "say the politically correct thing even when I know perfectly well it is false." Which sounds like authoritarianism.)

26. It is always better to trust the consensus of the scientific community on issues such as global warming, rather than to listen to the ignorant sceptics in our society who are trying to create doubt in people's minds.

27. You have to admire those who challenged the law and the majority's view by pushing for the abolition of affirmative action, for laws allowing ordinary citizens to carry firearms for self defense, for school voucher programs to let parents get their kids out of the trap of failing public schools.

A secondary objection that I offered to the list of 20 questions was that on two of them, one mentioned in my initial post, another in the Usenet discussion, the answer of a thoughtful respondent would go the wrong way–the non-authoritarian would give what is supposed to be the authoritarian answer. In each case, the reason is that the "non-authoritarian" answer is wrong. We have no reason to believe that atheists are "every bit as" virtuous as church goers–they might be more virtuous, they might be less. We have very good reasons to believe that gays are not as healthy as non-gays, given the existence of AIDS.

Professor Altemeyer responds:

"Is someone who strongly agrees with Item 6 showing authoritarian submission to a sub-group of skeptics? Possibly. But I doubt it. Atheists and agnostics have a pretty strong streak of individualism running through them--which is one of the reasons they are non-believers in a believing society."

The question isn't whether atheists are authoritarians. The question is whether some version of the idea "you aren't supposed to say that some groups of people are better than others" is common in our society. The answer is that it is, and it is the only reason I can see why someone who actually thought about those two questions would give what is supposed to be the "non-authoritarian" answers to them. Would you agree that someone who gives an answer he knows is wrong in conformity to that sort of social pressure is demonstrating what you call "right wing authoritarianism?"

Finally, let me thank Professor Altemeyer for his courteous response to my post. He didn't even complain that I should have told him I was criticizing him online–although if he had I would have responded that I have so far been unable to locate an email address for him, and snailmail and the telephone are so 20th century. My email address, in case he wants to shift part of the discussion to email, is ddfr@daviddfriedman.com. But I hope he will also respond here.

Why Teach Evolution

Apropos of some arguments about home schooling, vouchers, Christian fundamentalists, and related issues that I've been having online, it occurs to me that there are four different reasons to teach the theory of evolution as part of K-12 education:

1. It undermines religious belief. More precisely, it provides a convincing rebuttal to the watchmaker argument for the existence of God, which is one of the more persuasive arguments for that conclusion.

2. It is intellectually interesting.

3. It is useful for teaching other things, mainly biology.

4. Understanding it is useful to most students for making sense of the world around them and making decisions relevant to their lives.

The first seems to me a good reason for parents to teach their children about evolution but a suspect reason to teach it in the public schools; under a system of separation of church and state, the government shouldn't be going out of its way to attack religion any more than it should be going out of its way to promote it.

The second is a good reason but not a very strong one, given that there are lots of intellectually interesting things that could be taught, many of which, given limited amounts of time, won't be.

The third is a good reason but again not a very strong one; high school students don't learn much biology and most of what they learn could probably be taught without explaining the underlying logic of why organisms are as they are.

The fourth, I think, is the best reason of all--but the fourth depends on actually teaching the implications of evolution, which is unlikely to happen in public (or most private) schools. To take the most obvious one, evolution implies that we are "as if designed" for reproductive success. Males and females play strikingly different roles in reproduction. Hence evolutionary theory strongly suggests that males and females should have lots of differences--not merely reproductive machinery but distribution of abilities, behavioral patterns, and the like. That prediction is strongly supported by empirical evidence. For a good popular account, see Wright The Moral Animal. But it is an implication inconsistent with a good deal of modern ideology, most obviously the main--but not only--strain of modern feminism.

There are quite a lot of other implications for our species. For instance, theory suggests and evidence supports a pattern for species such as ours, with pair mating and offspring that require substantial care, of monogamy tempered by adultery, with good evolutionary reasons for both the monogamy and the adultery.

While there are surely some people who find none of the implications offensive--myself, for instance--I doubt they make up even a large minority of the population. Hence we are unlikely to see the parts of evolutionary theory most useful to ordinary people--its implications for understanding our own species--taught.

Lott, Lambert, guns, and the Merced killings

A number of years ago, John Lott gave a talk at my university which included some particularly striking evidence of both the downside of gun control and media bias on the subject, involving the murder of two children in Merced, California. By his account, their sister, an experienced shooter, made it to the room where the family guns were, could not get at them because they were locked up due to the state's safe storage law, instead went for a neighbor--with the result that her brother and sister were killed. These facts appeared in the local paper, but the part relevant to gun control was cut from the stories in the national media.

The account was sufficiently striking that I thought it worth checking. I found the original story in the local paper. There was no mention of the locked family guns. I reported this to John, who I have known for many years, and was disappointed to later hear that he was still using the story.

Recently, the issue resurfaced on a blog, set off by a post by my son, with comments by both Tim Lambert, an online critic of John's work, John, and me. According to John he had sent me the information supporting his account, as well as webbing it on his site; while that may well be true, I never got it. Checking the information on John's site, along with the discussion of the case on Tim Lambert's site, I found:

There are indeed two stories in the Fresno Bee that mention gun control in the context of the killing, both cited and linked to on John Lott's web page. The earlier is on August 26th, three days after it happened, and quotes the children's great-uncle. It says that there was a gun, but it was "locked away and hidden." The later is August 31, and says that "Carpenter also said he had a gun at his house that he kept locked away from his children because he feared government laws." (Carpenter is the children' father)

I believe what I had found and reported to John about was the original story, probably from the day after the killing, which did not have the gun control references. However:

1. Neither later story is consistent with the most striking detail in Lott's version, in which Jessica ran for where the family guns were stored but they were locked up tight. Both refer to one gun, the earlier version says it was hidden, there is no evidence that Jessica either knew where it was or could get to it. A more detailed account by Richard Poe that I found while googling--he interviewed both the great uncle and the children's mother--makes it clear that the gun was at the other end of the house from the room Jessica locked herself into and from which she climbed out a window to get help. According to that version, the gun wasn't locked up, merely kept on a high shelf unloaded. My guess is that that version is correct; the August 31 story, which refers to the gun being locked up, gives only an indirect quote of the father.

2. The first mention of the existence of the gun that Lott cites, by the great-uncle, is in a story published in the local paper on the 26th. The one account of the killing I could find that was based on a wire service version was from the 25th. So when John objected that the national media were cutting out the anti-gun control element of the story in the local paper, he was apparently objecting to the AP not citing a local story that had not yet been published.

Putting it all together, I conclude that the Merced murders provide evidence against gun control laws, but weaker evidence than John Lott (and Vin Suprynowicz, from whom I think John got the original story) claim. Even without safe storage laws, the parents of small children--one of them was nine, I don't know if she was the youngest--would be likely to keep firearms unloaded and on a high shelf or otherwise out of easy reach. Even if the Carpenter gun had been kept loaded and in easy reach, it isn't clear whether Jessica could have gotten to it.

The case does not, contrary to John's claim, provide clear evidence of media bias. The AP story did not remove evidence of the evils of gun control from the local story that was presumably its source, because the evidence wasn't in the local paper until after the AP story went out. That conclusion might change if it turns out that there are later stories in the national media, based on later wire service versions, but I didn't find any and would be mildly surprised to find national stories on a local killing still appearing three or four days after the event.

Interested readers should check out (at least) John's version and Tim Lambert's, both linked to above--and should be glad to live at a time when one can actually get both sides of such a controversy, and a good deal of the relevant evidence, with a few clicks.

Immigration and Terrorism

Politicians concerned about immigration, in particular illegal immigration to the U.S., routinely link the issue with control of terrorism; most recently, Rudy Giuliani did so in the context of a foiled terrorism plot in the U.K. His version would make some sense if he were actually proposing that the U.S. exclude Muslim immigrants; they are, after all, more likely recruits to Al Quaeda than immigrants of other religions.

But he isn't proposing that, and neither is anyone else. As they surely all know, illegal immigrants to the U.S. are typically from Latin America or East Asia, not places with large Muslim populations. Increasing their numbers may be a good or bad thing, but it isn't going to promote terrorism.

The remaining argument, always left vague, is "control of our borders." Presumably the theory is that an Al Queda operative is going to fly into Mexico, get himself smuggled across the Rio Grande, take a bus to Washington D.C. and blow something up. Why he should go to all that trouble when the U.S. has over fifty million legal foreign visitors a year is never explained. Does anyone believe that our customs agents can spot the terrorist needle in that haystack?

Am I missing a real argument for linking the two issues, or am I correct in suspecting that it's pure demagoguery?