Duck Dynasty, Medieval Islam, and Moral Philosophy

There was a recent public flap, brought to my attention by a post on my favorite blog, over a speech by Phil Robertson, the patriarch of Duck Dynasty. Its claim was that an atheist had no basis for moral judgement, no ground on which to describe horrific acts (described in some detail in the talk) as bad.

It occurred to me that the same claim had played a central role in a somewhat earlier argument, the dispute between two schools of philosophy, Ash'ari and Mu'tazila, in medieval Islam. One of the major points of disagreement between them was the question of whether it was possible to know good and evil, to at least some degree, by human reason or only by revelation. The Mu'tazili position was that it was knowable by reason, the Ash'ari position that it was not.

I see a logical problem with both Robertson's position and the position of his Ash'arite predecessors. You encounter a powerful supernatural being. If you have no ability to distinguish good from evil on your own, how can you tell whether he is God, the Devil, or, like the Greek and Norse gods, a morally ambiguous being, no more consistently good than the rest of us?

I doubt that Robertson has published much on moral philosophy, but does anyone know if this is an issue that has been explored in the literature, ancient or modern, and if so whether anyone has come up with a good rebuttal to my argument, which seems to imply that both believers and nonbelievers need some source of moral knowledge outside of religion?

Age Related Fertility Decline and the Link Between Facts and Policies

I recently heard a talk by a colleague on the issue of age related fertility decline. Her basic claim was that, although most women know it exists, most women badly underestimate how serious the problem is and how limited a solution assisted reproductive technology provides, with the result that many women who want children end up not having them. One policy proposal she offered was that sex education classes ought to include information on fertility decline. 

It struck me, listening to the talk, that in this case as in many others, the same facts can be used to support a wide range of different political conclusions. In this case ...

It sounded as though opposition to the idea of warning women about the risks, including criticism of the data on which the warnings were based, came largely from feminists concerned that such warnings would scare women out of career paths that included delayed motherhood. That is indeed one possible consequence. Pushing the argument further in that direction, one could argue that fertility decline is not only an argument in favor of the traditional family pattern, women marrying reasonably young and putting most of their efforts into the job of wife and mother, it is even an argument in favor of traditional sexual mores. In order for women to marry young there have to be men willing to marry them, and one reason why, in a more traditional society, men were willing to marry was that it was the only reliable way of getting sex. The more common and accepted nomarital sex is, the weaker that argument.

On the other hand ...

Someone with a different political orientation could use  the same facts to argue for a different set of conclusions. If waiting to have children until late in one's thirties or after risks never having them, and if having children earlier than that makes a serious career difficult or impossible under current circumstances, that might be an argument for changing those circumstances. If you take the desirability of career options for women as a given, fertility decline becomes a reason why husbands should do more of the work of taking care of children, employers be more willing to provide on site nurseries, offer extended periods of leave or part time work to new mothers, why social institutions should change to make it easier for women to combine career and motherhood before they get too old to make the latter a reliable option.

Similar considerations apply to the proposal to include information on fertility decline in sex education. As another member of the audience pointed out, that might make sex education more popular with conservatives, since it would be teaching how to have babies as well as how not to have them, the latter being how current sex education is often viewed.

On the other hand, one might argue that fully accurate information about fertility would have a perverse effect. Current campaigns pushing contraception leave the impression that unprotected sex is likely to lead to pregnancy, which is an argument both for contraception and against sex. Accurate information, as best I can tell by a little online search, would tell students that a single act of unprotected intercourse, randomly timed, has only about one chance in forty of resulting in pregnancy—less if the couple make an attempt to avoid the woman's fertile period. To adventurous teenagers, one chance in forty might look pretty safe, especially if they tell themselves that they are only going to try it once. So accurate information, not about fertility decline but about fertility, might easily produce an increase in the teen pregnancy rate.

My own conclusion from such considerations is that the best rule is to try to tell the truth. Whatever information you provide people, you cannot predict how they will use it, so trying to bias the facts to produce the result you want is quite likely not to work, might even have the opposite of the intended result. At least if you tell people the truth, you reduce one source of incorrect decisions.

Which is part of why I try, in my own writing, to give the arguments against my position as well as the arguments for. In support of which immodest claim I offer Chapter 55 from part V of the new third edition of my first book, which presents and discusses an argument against the stability of the set of institutions that I spent part III of the book describing and defending.

Ideas for a Cover for Another Book?

After the spectacular success of my project to use this blog to get a cover for the new edition of The Machinery of Freedom, I thought I might see if I could use it for a second project. My book Law's Order has been translated into Spanish and the people responsible asked me for ideas for a cover. My guess is that considerably fewer of the readers of the blog have read the latter book, so I may not be able to get an actual cover, although I would be happy to look at any if people want to submit them. But perhaps I can at least get ideas for a cover to send them.

For those not familiar with the book, it's on the economic analysis of law, not on libertarianism. The central idea is making sense of legal rules considered as a system of incentives, asking what their consequences will be on how rational individuals act. For a simple example, from the first chapter:

You live in a state where the most severe criminal punishment is life imprisonment. Someone proposes that since armed robbery is a very serious crime, armed robbers should get a life sentence. A constitutional lawyer asks whether that is consistent with the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. A legal philosopher asks whether it is just.

An economist points out that if the punishments for armed robbery and for armed robbery plus murder are the same, the additional punishment for the murder is zero—and asks whether you really want to make it in the interest of robbers to murder their victims.

That is what economics has to do with law. Economics, whose subject, at the most fundamental level, is not money or the economy but the implications of rational choice, is an essential tool for figuring out the effects of legal rules. Knowing what effects rules will have is central both to understanding the rules we have and to deciding what rules we should have.

The whole book can be read free online, either as a late draft in HTML or as page images of the final draft, including links to the virtual footnotes.

Baker's Borax—An Experiment

As some of you know, I have a long term interest in medieval cooking. One feature of that cooking is the absence of chemical leavening, our familiar baking powder and baking soda.

Or so I would have said a year ago. It turns out that al-Warraq's 10th century cookbook contains references to something he calls "Baker's Borax" which pretty clearly is not borax and apparently was a chemical leavening. I have been trying for some time to figure out what it was.

 Relevant facts:

1. In a recipe for a leavened fritter, al-Warraq writes:

"If there was not enough yeast in the batter, wait until it ferments well. If the yeast was bad, add some more borax (būraq) to the batter."

Which seems to imply that it functions as a chemical leavening.

2. Baker's borax was used by bakers to make bread shiny.

3. Another form of "borax" was natrum. Natrum is still used under that name for various purposes. It's a naturally occurring mix of sodium carbonates found in dry lake beds in Egypt.

Point 3 suggested that baker's borax might be, or contain, Sodium Bicarbonate--baking soda. That works in the al-Warraq recipes I've tried it in as a leavening.  When I tried  brushing the top of a loaf of bread with a baking soda solution before putting it in the oven, however, the result was brown, not shiny.

Various things, including comments on the SCA Cooks email list, suggested an alternative possibility, Potassium Carbonate, one of several things called "Potash." That also seemed to work, at least in the recipe I tried it in, but also did not make a loaf of bread shiny.

Today, for other reasons, I was planning to make some al-Warraq flatbreads. It occurred to me that although loaves of bread baked in an oven existed in al-Warraq's time, a lot of the bread consisted of flatbreads cooked much more rapidly by sticking them to the inside wall of a tannur, an effect I try to get by using a baking stone in a hot oven. There is no particular reason why the effect of baker's borax, whatever it was, would be the same for both kinds of bread.

So when I made my flat breads, I brushed part of some of them with a solution of Sodium Bicarbonate, part of some with a solution of Potassium Carbonate, before putting them on the baking stone. The result was pretty clear. Sodium Bicarbonate produced a dull surface, Potassium Carbonate a shiny surface. I took some pictures, and here is one. The loaf on the right has had all of it brushed with Potassium Carbonate. The loaf on the left has had the lower half brushed with Sodium Bicarbonate, the top half with nothing.

Hence my current best guess for baker's borax is Potassium Carbonate.

The Hardcopy of the Third Edition is Available on Amazon

Here

With a beautiful cover by David Aiello, based in part on an idea by Anarchei.

And it has just been the subject of two posts by my favorite blogger.

For Law Schools: A Modest Proposal

American law schools suffer from two serious problems, one old, one new. The old problem is the inconsistency between their practice, driven by institutional self-interest, and the moral beliefs of their faculty. The new problem is how to deal with the sharp decline in law school applications over the past few years.

How many students are willing to come to a law school depends on its reputation. That reputation depends, in part, on the performance of its students, how many pass the state bar and how many get jobs, as reflected in the school's rating in the annual U.S. News and World Report rankings. Nobody in the law school business, at least nobody I have met, regards the ratings as a reliable measure of school quality, but everyone watches them. A further reason to care about the performance of the school's students is that if they perform well enough after graduation, they may make lots of money and donate some of it to the school.

The performance of students depends in part on how good a job the school does, in part on how able the students are. Thus every school has an incentive to try to attract good students in order to raise its ratings in order to get more students to apply in order to get the tuition revenue to pay the cost of operating the school. One way of attracting good students is by offering the best students scholarships that pay part or all of the cost of going to law school, and law schools routinely do so. The result is that the best students, the ones who are smart, hard working, and likely to end up with high paying jobs, are  subsidized at the expense of the students lower down in the class who are paying full tuition.

Most law professors have political views that favor benefiting poor people at the expense of rich people. The actual practice of the schools they teach in and help run has precisely the opposite effect. It subsidizes the future rich at the expense of the future poor, the students who, having spent three years and a lot of money getting a law degree, face very uncertain chances of being offered the sort of job that degree is supposed to qualify them for.

That is the old problem. Everyone in the law business knows it, although not everyone chooses to talk about it. 

The new problem is that law school applications have fallen sharply in the past few years, with the result that many law schools face serious budget problems. The only way they can keep enrollment up is by lowering their standards for admission, but lower standards for admission will eventually result in lower ratings, which will make it even harder to maintain enrollment. Schools can try to cut costs, but a large part of the cost is personnel, and a large and expensive part of that is for professors with tenure. It looks like a downward spiral to bankruptcy, at least until enough schools have shrunk or gone out of business to restore the balance between the number of students who want to enroll and the number of seats  law schools want to fill.

I have at least a partial solution to both problems:

Consider a school with a target enrollment of 200. It currently plans to set the lower limit for accepting applications at a level, defined mainly by LSAT score and undergraduate grade point average, that will result in accepting 400, half of whom it expects to enroll.

It instead lowers the cutoff far enough to get an entering class of 250. Fitting them in is no problem because it has sufficient classroom space and teaching staff for more than that, due to the decline in enrollment over the previous several years.

At the end of the first year it sends a message to the fifty students at the bottom of the first year class, warning them that on the basis of their grades so far they are at serious risk of failing to pass the bar. The school offers to refund their first year tuition in full if they choose to drop out. If only thirty accept the offer, a similar message goes to twenty more students. Once the process has been going for a year or two, the school should be able to make a better estimate of the acceptance rate for their offer and so reduce enrollment to 200 in one step.

What is the result?

1. The school ends up with the same revenue as if it followed its original plan and admitted 200 students. Costs are only increased by a little, because the school has excess resources, physical and human, due to past enrollment decline.

2. Since the students least likely to succeed have been warned and offered their money back, the professors may legitimately feel less guilty about taking the money of students who are ultimately not going to make it.

3. First year grades are a considerably better predictor of bar passage rates than the information available at admission, so the school's bar pass rate goes up.

4. In the long run, more students will be willing to apply, because they know if that if law school turns out to be too hard for them they will have an opportunity to leave and get their money back. 

In an earlier post I offered a different approach to the first problem.  

Why Does Highway Construction Take So Long?

I live near the connection of two major interstates, 880 and 280, and frequently take it. Work has been going on to improve the connection for quite a long time; the project was approved in 2011 and under construction as least as early as 2013. Most of the time the resulting constriction is only a minor inconvenience, but during rush hour it can result in a significant delay in getting from one highway to the other.

It seems as though what they are doing should take no more than a few weeks. Four possible explanations of why it is instead taking years occur to me:

1. I may be missing important elements of the process that make it much more time consuming than I would expect. Perhaps there are many steps that have to be taken in sequence. Perhaps some part of the process, such as the drying and curing of concrete, takes much longer than I realize.

2. Perhaps doing it slowly is a little easier than doing it fast and the people making the relevant decisions, the construction firm and the California Department of Transport that employs them, have little or no incentive to take account of the inconvenience to drivers of having a major intersection under construction.

3. Perhaps the construction company has persuaded friends in the Department to agree to contract terms that pay by time rather than by project, making it in their interest to stretch out the process.

4. Perhaps the government officials and the politicians above them believe that longer is better, that the political benefits of keeping drivers aware of their highway dollars at work more than outweigh the political cost of continued delays.

There are probably other possible explanations that have not occurred to me. Does anyone know what the right explanation is? Any evidence on how long such projects take in other states or other countries?

My First Novel: A Belated Comment

Reading occasional Amazon comments on Harald, my first novel, I am struck by the tendency of readers familiar with my nonfiction to assume that the novel is intended as an argument in favor of libertarianism. It is not. 

I portray three different societies in the novel, all based on historical models. One, the Vales, where my protagonist comes from, is loosely modeled on saga period Iceland. Another, the kingdom of Kaerlia, where most of the book happens, is loosely modeled on early Norman England. The third, the Empire, the antagonist against which the first two are allied, is a mix of Byzantine, Roman, and Abbasid institutions—the relation between the Emperor and his sons was inspired by the relation between Haroun al Rashid and his, although my emperor is considerably more competent than al Rashid was.

Each system has strengths and weaknesses. The most obvious weakness of the Vales is that it has neither a professional army supported by taxation nor a feudal levy. Harald, my protagonist, faces the continuing problem of raising an army of volunteers. The historical models I was thinking of were the Norse armies that ravaged England in the period leading up to Alfred the Great. As best I can tell, they were not national armies but entrepreneurial projects, warriors following a leader with a good reputation in search of land and loot.

One result is that Harald's military strategy largely consists of logistic warfare, of maneuvering the opposing army into a position where it must either surrender or die of hunger or thirst. He cannot afford to fight battles where a significant number of his troops get killed because if he does, nobody will show up next time. He is fighting a defensive war, so cannot offer land to his troops, but does offer loot, captured from the armies he is fighting or paid as ransom for legionaries forced to surrender. Also excitement, glory, and training in useful skills—when his people are not fighting the Empire, some of them are serving it as caravan guards and the like. And it helps that, in addition to his own troops, he has under his command the feudal army of his ally the king of Kaerlia.

The Empire has, from a military standpoint, several significant advantages. It has a highly trained professional army, the legions, which Harald describes as the best infantry in the world. It has the sort of culture that keeps written records and uses them. Harald has been fighting the Empire for more than twenty years and his current opponents have read detailed accounts of his past battles, which means that he gets to use any particular trick only once. To balance that, it has a culture with less room for originality and initiative than his. Artos, the best of the Imperial commanders, is technically as good a general as Harald. But he is less original, less unconventional, because an imperial officer with Harald's approach to solving problems would have been fired, possibly hanged, long before he reached high rank. The only place for that approach in the imperial system is at the very top, in the contest for the throne, and the one example we see of it is due not to Artos but to his employer, the younger and abler son of the Emperor.

As I try to make clear, the reason the Empire has not succeeded in conquering the Vales and the Kingdom is not that its system is inferior to theirs. It is that Harald, his ally the king of Kaerlia (who dies just before the novel starts), and his other ally the Lady Commander of the Order, happen to be extraordinarily talented people and close friends—two very able military commanders and a sovereign sufficiently wise to not only get and retain allies, but give his allies command over the combined army on the grounds that they are better at the job than he is.

I have written and published two novels. Both reflect my political interests and my professional interests as an economist. Neither of them is intended as an argument in favor of libertarianism. 

And for those interested:

Harald on Amazon
Harald web page
Harald as free podcasts
Salamander kindle
Salamander hardcopy

Redit AMA planned for this Wednesday

2 P.M. PST.

For the reason see.

Exploiting my Thirty Minutes of Fame

Someone recently posted, somewhere online, a picture of me playing World of Warcraft while listening to a talk at the International Students for Liberty conference last weekend. It got quite a lot of attention, including, I am told, "over 5,000,000 click rate and 10k SHARE" in China.

My guess is that there are two things going on. One is that people who already know of my existence see this as evidence that I am a real person, not some academic off in outer space somewhere. The other is that people who have been told by their parents or other authority figures that playing WoW is a juvenile activity and a waste of time see the picture as evidence on their side of the argument.

My son Bill, having observed the phenomenon online, suggests that I ought to find some way of taking advantage of my temporary fame. His only idea was setting up an AMA on Reddit, something I might do if I can figure out how—I have done two AMA's in the past, but both were arranged by other people. 

This post is an alternative approach. If lots of people are (briefly) looking at me, the obvious thing to do is to point them at things of mine that I would like them to read and that they might enjoy reading:

My web page, with lots and lots of stuff on it, including links to the full text of several of my books and most of my articles.

The third edition of my first book, The Machinery of Freedom (Kindle. The hardcopy will be available shortly on Amazon).

Harald, my first novel. EBook version. Free podcasts of it, read by me.

Salamander, my second novel. (Kindle. The hardcopy of that will also be available shortly on Amazon)

And for any who share my interests in recreational medievalism, two books coauthored with my wife:

A Miscellany. Free pdf. Hardcopy.

How to Milk an Almond, Stuff an Egg, and Armor a Turnip: A Thousand Years of Recipes. Free pdf. Hardcopy.

Enjoy.

Wanted: A Better Shower Controller

Taking a shower this morning I was struck, not for the first time, by how badly designed the mechanism for controlling the temperature is. Turn it a little to the right and the shower is uncomfortably hot. Turn it just a little back to the left and it is uncomfortably cold.

What is going on is pretty clear. The controller maps its position to the amount of hot water in the mix in a roughly linear fashion. All the way to the left is straight cold, all the way to the right is straight hot, any intermediate position is a proportional mix.

In practice, almost nobody wants a cold shower or, unless the temperature of the hot water is pretty low, a straight hot shower. What almost everyone wants is a mix within a fairly limited range—say from .6 hot to .8 hot—with the exact range varying both with the temperature of the hot and the cold water and the preferences of the person taking the shower.

Imagine, to make life simple, that the controller has a handle that can be rotated through an arc of a hundred degrees. In the simplest version of my improved controller, the zero degree position is still pure cold, since there may be some masochists who like a cold shower to wake themselves up in the morning. The hundred degree position is still pure hot, since the water heater might be malfunctioning and producing only lukewarm water. But the first ten degrees of rotation map into the range from 0 hot water to .6 hot water. The final ten degrees map into the range from .8 to pure hot. The other eighty degrees of rotation cover the range from .6 to .8, giving me much better control over the temperature in the range I care about. A slightly improved model, designed to take account of variations in the temperature of the hot and cold water in different houses and hotels, has an adjustment that shifts exactly where the central range is, used once and then left alone unless something changes those temperatures. 

For the Silicon Valley market we have the intelligent version, which keeps track of what temperature the user actually takes a shower at and adjusts its central range accordingly. Its high end variant allows for up to four users with different tastes in shower temperature. Step into the shower, tell it which you are, and it automatically chooses a mapping that makes it easy to control the temperature over the range you care about.

For the next generation, we have the thermostatic version, which maps the setting of the controller not to the amount of hot and cold in the mix but to its temperature. Turn on the shower and for the first few seconds nothing is coming out, because the "hot water" isn't—it has cooled in the pipe between the water heater and the shower. When the temperature of the hot water reaches the level set on the controller, the shower turns on. Thereafter it adjusts the mix to give the temperature it is set for. As in the previous versions, the position of the controller maps to the temperature of the water in a non-linear fashion, designed to use most of its range to cover the range of temperature that the user cares about.

Do any of these already exist?

Should I Throw Out Books?

I do not like to throw things out and my house has a full basement, so from time to time I pack things for which I have no use, now or in the foreseeable future, into plastic boxes, label them, and lug them down to the basement. That includes old magazines, obsolete computer gear, and books. Two boxes worth just this evening.

The implicit theory is that some day, twenty, fifty, or a hundred years from now, a future occupant, perhaps a descendant, will find what I have stored of interest. In some cases the idea is not entirely implausible. The LNW80, for instance, that was my first computer, might be fun to play with for a future kid with an interest in gadgets and the history of technology, and similarly for my vectrex game machine. 

But what about books? My younger son reads them as kindles on his phone. There are lots of people around, of course, who still prefer to read books as books, one reason I have just been converting two of mine, currently available in the form of Kindles, into print on demand hardcopies. But will there be lots of such people fifty years from now? I doubt it. And if there are, there will also be a lot of old books for them that nobody else wants.

Which makes me think that instead of putting books I will never read in the basement, perhaps I should put them in the trash. But I don't have the heart to do it.

Better than Facebook

For many years I spent a lot of time in conversation and argument on various Usenet groups. Eventually Usenet began to fade, with groups losing members and activity, and I shifted much of my online interaction to Facebook and G+. 

Facebook has an enormous population and a lot of different interest groups represented, but the average quality of the conversation, in my experience, is pretty low. That became particularly clear in climate arguments, where most people on both sides were more interested in cheering for their team and badmouthing the opposition than in understanding the arguments, science and evidence. One illustration was an error that I discussed in an earlier post. Someone posted a link to a video of an experiment that supposedly proved that CO2 was a greenhouse gas. Believers in AGW supported it, critics attacked it, and almost nobody realized that the experiment, even if done perfectly, did not support the conclusion—because almost nobody, in a discussion centered on global warming, understood how the greenhouse effect works (for details see my earlier post).

Not all of Facebook is that bad, of course. The SCA groups contain a good deal of interest and a higher ratio of light to heat. And if one finds someone who is both reasonable and an active poster, friending him and following his posts can be worth doing—although even then the quality is pretty variable.

I think I have now found a better venue for online argument and conversation. I mentioned in an earlier post a blog, Slate Star Codex, by an unusually able, energetic and fair minded poster. It turns out that not only does he write interesting essays, he also attracts a pretty high quality of commenters, making the comment threads interesting conversations, sometimes interesting arguments. Once it occurred to me to read the latest essay, for which the comment thread was still open, instead of whichever old essay looked most interesting, I had a brand new way of interacting with interesting people online.

Not only does Scott write interesting essays and attract interesting people, some of them write interesting essays as well, as I discovered by following a link in a comment thread to this one.