World of Warcraft: The Next Step

In World of Warcraft, most communication between players is text, typed on a keyboard and read off a screen. But it is also possible for players in a group to speak to each other, using either third party software or a voice option provided by Blizzard. Doing this has at least two obvious advantages: Most people can speak much faster than they can type, and speaking leaves your fingers free to control your character.

From the standpoint of role players, however, it has a serious disadvantage. It's hard to believe that the person you are talking with is a female elf when "her" voice is that of a young man. It's hard to believe in the elderly dwarf when the voice is that of a sixteen year old girl. And it's hard to hear the frivolous and irresponsible gnome in the voice of a sixty-some professor.

This problem is soluble. There exist ways of modifying the sound of a voice--shifting the frequency up or down, changing it in subtler ways. Blizzard should make them available as an option on its in-game speech. Players who want to sound like themselves can, but so can players who want so sound like their character—deeper voices for males, still deeper for dwarves, and whatever tones feel right for other races. With a little practice, it ought to be possible for the speaker to learn to control the modified voice well enough to express emotions in a believable fashion, and so to carry in-game role playing to a new level.

His vs "His or hers"

I have just been going through the copy edited version of my next book. Many of the editor's suggested changes are correct and helpful. But I am continually irritated by her practice of replacing almost every "he" by "he or she," and similarly for "his," "him," etc.

I can see only three plausible reasons for the practice. One is that the fact that the person in question might be either male or female is important to what you are saying, and so should be emphasized. Thus in one passage, where the point I was making was that you wouldn't know anything about the person--the context was encrypted interaction online--the editor changed "he" to "he or she" and I changed that to "he, she or it." But in most of the text, gender is simply irrelevant--the points I am making would be equally true in a world of all men, all women, or all hermaphrodites.

The second possible reason is that "he or she" is seen as politically correct, thus using it instead of following the traditional practice of letting "he" stand for either male or gender neutral shows the enlightenment of the author. This strikes me as at best silly, at worse conformism at the cost of good writing.

The third reason is that the writer wants to make a political point--that the traditional practice reflects features of the society that writer wishes to criticize. This seems to me a legitimate reason if that happens to be a point that that writer wants to make. But it isn't a point I want to make, and I strongly object to being drafted into someone else's crusade.

That said, I will happily agree that the lack of gender neutral pronouns in English is a problem. With the one exception mentioned above, I have accepted (so far) none of my editor's alterations from "he" to "he or she." To my ear that is not only clumsy--three words instead of one--it is misleading, since it suggests, almost always incorrectly, that there is some particular reason for pointing out that the person in question might be female. What I have done is to look for another way of writing the sentence that works at least as well and avoids raising the question of whether I am talking only about males. Sometimes that is possible, sometimes it is not.

Another possible solution would be to give in to the common practice of using "they" as a gender neutral singular, a practice I abhor. I suspect my editor does too, since she is enough of a grammatical purist to insist on treating "data" as a grammatical plural and to distinguish carefully between "who" and "whom."

Ideology as Coalition: Environmentalists vs The Poor

It is a familiar observation that political parties are coalitions containing a variety of ideologies and interest groups. It is a little less obvious that ideologies too are coalitions.

Consider the American conservative movement of the fifties and sixties. It was made up of at least three distinct groups: Traditionalist conservatives, classical liberals/libertarians, and southern conservatives, in large part populist. Where some had strong views and the others didn't--anti-communism, for instance--they tended to all go along. Where different groups had different strong views--government control over sexual behavior, for example--they agreed to disagree. The more common the latter situation was, the greater the tension within the ideology.

The modern American left is also a coalition. Someone who thinks of himself as a leftist is probably in favor of increasing environmental regulation, redistribution in favor of the poor, greater government regulation of business, gay rights, feminism, prohibition of private discrimination on any of a considerable variety of grounds. He is probably against aggressive foreign policy, anti-nuclear, suspicious of law enforcement and the criminal justice system but supportive of class actions, punitive damages, and similar features of the tort system.

In that coalition too, there are potential strains. For someone in favor of helping poor people, the economic development of China and India is arguably the best news of the past fifty years. Development was, after all, the explicit goal of foreign economic aid, development planning, a variety of programs in the post-war period that were supposed to lift the third world out of poverty--and didn't. The fact that more than two billion people are now in the process of moving from extreme poverty towards the sort of life westerners have long lived represents an enormous improvement in the condition of the world's poor.

It also represents a sharp increase in the consumption of depletable resources and production of carbon dioxide. The same changes that should be good news to the leftist qua egalitarian are very bad news to the leftist qua environmentalist. Not only are people who used to be poor consuming more and polluting more, they are cutting down rain forests in South America, threatening endangered species in Asia. They are, in other words, doing the same things our ancestors did.

Nuclear power is another obvious problem for the left. It provides a way of replacing a large fraction of fossil fuel power with an alternative that does not produce CO2, using current technology at costs not wildly above current power costs—as France has demonstrated. Arguably, it provides the only such way. With fairly modest improvements in the technology of synthesizing liquid hydrocarbons, it could replace practically all fossil fuel use. But the left is traditionally anti-nuclear for a mix of reasons, including hostility to nuclear weapons and a more general suspicion of technology.

Biofuels present the most recent example of a conflict between environmentalism and concern for the poor. Supporters argue that they reduce dependence on foreign (and depletable) supplies of oil and reduce CO2 production—although there now seems to be evidence that the latter may not be true. Critics point out that diverting large amounts of farm land and farm output from producing a lot of food to producing a little fuel will cause--indeed, has already caused--a steep increase in food prices, an implicit tax that falls most heavily on the poor.

All of these conflicts among left wing objectives are accidental—it just happens that the same change which helps in one direction hurts in another. There are additional problems that are more fundamental. One reason some on the left don't want a nuclear solution to global warming is that they see the threat of global warming as a useful argument for lifestyle changes—less power consumption, urban instead of suburban life styles, less consumption—that they favor for other reasons. For those in that position, a way of preventing global warming that doesn't require other people to revise their lives is a threat, not a promise.

In much the same way, the threat of nuclear winter was pushed not so much because its supporters believed in it as because its supporters were, understandably enough, looking for ways to prevent nuclear war. In both cases, the problem with such indirect motives is not that they are necessarily unjustified but that they are likely to lead to dishonest arguments. If your objective is not to prevent global warming or nuclear winter but only to use their threat to persuade other people to do things you want them to do or not to do things you don't want them to do, whether the arguments you offer are right becomes less important than whether they are persuasive.

Thoughts for Obama

Two years ago, I suggested that the Democrats ought to be trying to pull libertarian voters, broadly defined, out of the Republican party--which hasn't provided much for them in recent years. I don't know whether Barack Obama is thinking in those terms or not, but it does look as though he is trying to change the current coalition structure that defines the parties, which could be interesting. How might he do it?

My original suggestion was for the Democrats to come out in favor of medical marijuana, at least to the extent of making it clear that federal law enforcement would be instructed not to target people who were using marijuana in conformity with state law. That not only sends a signal to voters unhappy with the current war on drugs, it also suggests a greater willingness than either party has shown to respect state sovereignty, at least on that issue.

A second possibility that occurs to me is to take advantage of the budgetary implications of Obama's opposition to the Iraq War. If the U.S. pulls out, we will get a "peace dividend"--a whole lot of money now being spent on the war will be available for other purposes. No doubt lots of people, in both parties, will have ideas for ways of spending it.

Suppose Obama commits himself not to let the peace dividend be spent on new projects, or at least not all of it. Suppose, for instance, that he promises that at least half of the saving will be used to reduce the budget deficit. That puts him in the position of the fiscally responsible candidate, which should appeal to conservatives as well as libertarians. And it is a pledge that McCain cannot match, since he supports the war and so is not going to have any peace dividend to allocate.

What other things can he do along these lines? He can't come out for school vouchers without alienating the teachers' unions, which are a major power in his party--although I can barely imagine his doing it when running for a second term, if his position then is strong enough. What about coming out against overreaching by the criminal justice system--no knock raids on the homes of defenseless grandmothers, rogue prosecutors, and the like? Is there some way he could do that without opening himself up to the "soft on crime" charge?

How about property rights? Kelo seems to have been massively unpopular, resulting in a lot of state laws purporting to restrict seizures of private property by eminent domain. Is there some way he could get on that bandwagon? It would pull in libertarians--whom would it offend?

Suggestions?

Verse Contradictions

A very long time ago, a friend of the family's named Dorothy Brady introduced us to the game of finding pairs of proverbs with opposite meanings, such as "He who hesitates is lost"/"Look before you leap." More recently it occurred to me that one might do the same thing with pairs of poems, ideally both by the same poet. My one example so far—my wife thinks she pointed it out to me twenty-some years ago—is a pair of sonnets by Millay.

Part of the argument of "Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow" is summed up in the line "Were you not lovely I would leave you now."

While the argument of "Love is not blind" is

"Well I know
What is this beauty men are babbling of;
I only wonder why they prize it so."

Which reminds me of a quote that I thought was by Heine but now cannot find a source for:

"Why should I be always of my own opinion?"

Can anyone offer other such pairs of poems? A source for my quote?

Default Rules and Soft Paternalism

Consider two firms, otherwise identical, with different default rules. Firm A tells its employees that it normally diverts 10% of their salary to a pension fund but will be happy to pay the money directly to the employee if he prefers. Firm B tells its employees that it normally pays them all of their salary, but will be happy to divert 10% of the salary to a pension fund for any employee who prefers that option.

On the face of it, one would expect about the same fraction of employees to go with each option in each firm, since the amount at stake is large enough to make the extra cost of filling out a request or stopping by the human resources office to tell them that you want to switch away from the default trivial in comparison. I am told that in fact such default rules have quite a large effect--that many more employees will go with the pension plan in firm A than in firm B. I have not looked into the literature on the subject myself, but for the moment will assume it is true.

If so, that suggests the possibility of "soft paternalism." If the government thinks employees would be better off putting money into a pension plan, they require all employers to act like firm A. It is "soft" because the employee is still free to choose whether or not to go along. I gather that some thinkers on what I think of as the new new left--academics who accept a good deal of the libertarian view of the desirability of markets and individual choice while still looking for ways of altering behavior in what they think desirable ways--have made proposals along these lines. Presumably part of their argument is that if individual choice is being affected in this way by default rules then it isn't entirely rational, so there is nothing wrong with taking advantage of the irrationality to get people to voluntarily choose what they "ought" to choose.

When I discussed this issue with my daughter Rebecca, she offered an interesting explanation of the pattern of behavior--interesting in part because it makes the behavior rational. The cost of switching into or out of the pension plan is negligible, but the cost of getting the information needed to decide whether to switch in or out is not. In this case as in many others, one cheap way of getting information is by observing what other people do. If, as seems plausible, the firm will have chosen as the default the option most of its employees prefer, thus saving trouble for all concerned, the default rule is a signal of the choices of other employees, hence cheap evidence of what an employee who doesn't know which option is better should do. So the employee rationally goes along with the default option unless he has some good reason to think the alternative is better.

If this analysis is correct, it implies that soft paternalism won't work, or at least won't work for very long. Once it becomes clear that default rules are being chosen not by the employer to fit employee preferences but by the government to nudge employees into doing what the government thinks they should do, the argument for going along with the default breaks down.

Of course there might be a new argument--that if the government thinks you should get a pension that's a reason to do so. But if people actually accept that, there is no need to use default rules; the government can simply tell employees what it thinks they should do.

Law School Accreditation and Bar Passage Rates

The Volokh Conspiracy Blog has a recent post on and discussion of ABA proposals to make law school accreditation depend on bar passage rates.

As anyone involved with law schools knows, bar passage rates are a hot topic closely connected with the issue of affirmative action. A recent article in the Stanford Law Review by Richard Sanders argued that affirmative action by law schools injures blacks; the student who would have done reasonably well in (say) a third tier law school with other students about as able as he was gets admitted to a first or second tier law school eager to increase its (racial) diversity, and ends up never passing the bar. I discussed the issue in a post some time back. After hearing about the article I asked a colleague likely to be unsympathetic with its conclusion if she knew of a good rebuttal. Having read the article she suggested, whose argument ultimately came down to "Sanders is a racist," I concluded that if that is the best rebuttal available, Sanders is probably right. If anyone knows of a better rebuttal, I would be interested in the cite.

The easiest way for a law school to raise its bar passage rates in order not to be at risk of losing its accreditation is by reducing its willingness to admit black students with low LSATs. Thus the ABA proposals, apparently made in response to pressure from the Department of Education, are likely to be seen as an attack on affirmative action. They are also seen as threatening traditionally black law schools. If Sanders is correct, the first may actually be a good thing; the second is not.

In my view, the fundamental problem with the ABA proposal is that it is measuring the wrong thing. There are two different mistakes one would like law schools to avoid:

1. Admitting students who won't benefit from admission and probably won't pass the bar, in order to raise the racial diversity of their student body.

2. Rejecting students who will benefit from admission but will still have a lower than average chance of passing the bar, given where they are starting from, in order to raise the school's bar passage rate.

The real test of the education provided by a law school should be some measure of value added rather than quality of graduates (as measured by bar passage rates). The fact that a school can get a student who starts at the 99th percentile of the LSAT to pass the bar isn't much evidence that it is worth going to. If the ABA is going to set standards along these lines, they should be based, not on average bar passage rates, but on the relation between bar passage rates and entering LSATs.

Doing that is pretty straightforward. Run a regression for each state with LSAT as the independent variable, bar passage probability as the dependent variable, to find, on average, the probability that a student who starts with a given LSAT will end up passing the bar. Use the results of that regression to calculate what the bar passage rate ought to be for a given class at a given law school if the school is providing an average education. If the actual rate is more than a fixed amount below that, the school doesn't get accredited. That way accreditation provides the information that matters to the student--how much more likely am I to pass the bar if I go to this school or that?

Of course, I also have reservations about other parts of the system--but at least, if they are going to do this part, they ought to do it right.

Accreditation requires a yes/no decision. The approach I have described also makes it possible to provide more detailed information to applicants trying to decide whether to go to law school and, if so, what school to go to. Each school could report bar passage rate for its graduates over the past ten years as a function of entering LSAT, both as an absolute number and relative to the average figure for the state.

What a student wants to know, after all, is not how good a job the school does on average but how good a job it is likely to do for him. If, as Sanders' article implies, a student with a less than stellar LSAT is likely to learn less at Harvard Law School than at some less prestigious school better adapted to teaching students like him, that is information the student ought to have.

Barack v Hilary v ...

This morning, while driving, I heard some excerpts from the Obama/Clinton debate. Judging by those, Obama is the more libertarian of the two. Both want large scale government involvement in health insurance, but Obama is willing to permit people to choose not to be insured if they really don’t want to be insured and actually sounds uncomfortable with the idea of forcing people to do things. He also has made statements in favor of decriminalization of marijuana, although they suggest a pretty watered down version and it isn’t a position he has emphasized in the campaign.

I am also prejudiced against highly educated people who choose to use “I” when “me” is grammatically correct—as Hilary did in one of the bits I heard. It might be simple ignorance, but I doubt it; my suspicion is that she is playing up to people who think “I” is the classier word.

If I were voting in the Democratic primary, I would vote for Obama. The more interesting question is whether, if he gets the Democratic nomination and McCain or Romney gets the Republican nomination, I and other libertarians should prefer the Democratic candidate.

Just over two years ago, I had a post here suggesting that the Democrats should try to pull libertarian voters out of the Republican party. It will be interesting to see if Obama tries and succeeds. I am unlikely to vote for him; I almost never vote for major party candidates. But there are a lot of libertarians more broadly defined--people who favor more liberty than we have in both economic and social areas--who do. In the past most of them have voted Republican, but that was less true in 2004 than in 2000. It may be still less true in 2008.

---

After first posting the above, I came across a page where some people are arguing that Obama is, in some important sense, a left-libertarian.

A Constitutional Question

One argument used to justify the Administration's violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the claim that such surveillance is part of defense activity, that the Constitution makes the President commander in chief of the army and navy, hence that he has complete freedom in how he conducts defense activity, hence that he cannot be restricted by FISA.

But the Constitution also says that:

"The Congress shall have Power To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;"

So if surveillance is part of the activity of the army and navy, Congress is entitled to make rules regulating it--for instance FISA.

Am I missing something?

Theists, Atheists, and Pattern Recognition

I see a red pen sitting on my desk, between my keyboard and my computer. How do I do it?

The answer cannot be as simple as "my eyes send me the information." What is incoming from my retina is not a description of the world, with pens and keyboards, but a pattern of colors, the contents of my visual field. Figuring out that the reason part of that pattern is red and part brown is that I am seeing a red object of particular shape and size sitting on a brown surface requires my brain to analyze that pattern and deduce from it what I am seeing. As A.I. researchers discovered when they tried to program computers to make such deductions, it isn't easy. We are able to do it only because evolution has provided our brains with very sophisticated pattern recognition software, probably incorporating a good deal of information about the nature of the world around us, hence the likely meaning of the patterns we see.

An analogous process occurs when we use all of the information available to us to form a picture of the world--not merely what is where in the visual field but what the universe is like and why. We are trying to construct a pattern, a picture of reality, which makes a reasonably good fit to the available facts. The fit is unlikely to be perfect, both because we may not get the pattern quite right and because some of the "facts" we are fitting may be wrong. And the process of constructing the pattern involves nothing as simple as formal logic. Just as in seeing, we are using pattern recognition software created by evolution and incorporating beliefs about the nature of reality—true or false—that led our ancestors to reproductive success.

Pattern recognition need not give an unambiguous result. In one familiar example, the same black and white picture can be seen either as a vase or as two faces. In another familiar example, a paranoid may have a picture of the world that fits all of the data available to him, with apparent inconsistencies explained by the plots of his enemies.

Which gets me back to the discussion of religion in my earlier post. Some people, trying to make sense of the world around them, construct a pattern that includes some sort of god. Others construct a pattern that doesn't. Neither pattern is the result of rigorous deduction from the data or anything close, so it isn't surprising that atheists cannot prove theists wrong, nor theists prove atheists wrong.

That does not mean that logic can tell us nothing at all about the subject. Some patterns are inconsistent with enough data to make it very unlikely that they are correct, or close to correct; one can climb Mount Olympus and observe the absence of the Olympians. But I think it is clear from a very large number of arguments conducted by many people over many centuries that one cannot, on that basis, reject either all versions of a universe with a god or gods, or all versions of a universe without.

George Bush v Mohammed ibn Tugluq

Ibn Battuta, the famous 14th c. world traveler, spent some time as a judge in the service of Mohammed ibn Tugluq, the fabulously wealthy Sultan of Delhi. At the end of his description of that part of his life, he has two summary sections, one listing good things about his boss, one bad things.

One of the good things involved an incident where the Sultan slapped a young man under circumstances where he had no legal right to do so. The young man went to law. Mohammed ibn Tugluq made no attempt to block the legal procedings. The court found in the plaintiff's favor, ruling that he had the right either to monetary compensation from the Sultan or to repay slap for slap. He took the second option, slapped the Sultan and, Ibn Battuta tells us, he himself saw the Sultan's turban come off and fall to the ground.

Reading the account, two things are clear. One is that Ibn Battuta believed that the Sultan acted properly, that rulers ought to be under the law just like other people. The other is that he did not expect rulers to act that way, hence regarded doing so as particularly creditable.

Some years ago, George Bush confessed to multiple felonies committed both by himself and some of the people who work for him—interceptions of phone communications without the warrants required by FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, written to regulate just such interceptions. Under the act, either making such an interception or knowingly using information obtained by such an interception is a felony punishable by up to five years and ten thousand dollars. By Bush's own account he had himself committed the latter felony and lots of people at NSA had committed the former.

For some reason, none of them have been charged.

Somewhat later, it came out that U.S. phone companies had turned over to the government massive amounts of customer information in violation of a different federal law. A few of the customers sued. The administration is currently attempting to get Congress to pass legislation that will immunize the phone companies from liability.

One can't expect all rulers to live up to the high standards of the 14th century Sultan of Delhi.

How Will Clinton and Obama Vote on ...

Congress is considering legislation that would modify the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make the illegal interceptions the NSA has been making since 9/11 legal and immunize the phone companies against civil liability for turning over to the government phone records in direct violation of federal law.

Has either Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama said how she or he will vote?

They have a problem. Lots of people, including both me and, I presume, many liberal Democrats, are unhappy about legislation designed to protect companies from the consequences of deliberately breaking the law. Liberal Democrats are likely to be particularly unhappy about doing it to benefit phone companies, prototypical examples of big, hence presumptively evil, corporations. And liberal Democrats aren't all that enthusiastic about the War on Terror. Voting in favor of the legislation in its present form, instead of supporting Senator Dodd in his attempt to force the removal of that provision from the legislation will, I expect, cost votes in the Democratic primaries.

But it isn't enough to get nominated; the candidates also want to get elected. Liberal Democrats will vote for the party's nominee, whichever it is; they have nowhere else to go. To win the election, the Democratic candidate has to get votes from people in the center. Presumably that's why both candidates, and the Democratic congress, are unwilling to come out clearly against the Iraq War.

Voting to block legislation which, its supporters will claim, is designed to protect patriotic American companies from having to pay massive damages for helping fight terrorism, may be a bit risky. It will be interesting to see what the candidates do.

On a slight tangent ... . I recently found out that the named plaintiffs in the class action suit against the telephone companies include both one of my colleagues and my ex-Congressman.

Adam Smith on Laptops in the Classroom

Professors have a mixed view of student laptops in the classroom. They are useful tools for taking notes and, if connected to the internet, can also be used to quickly research things relevant to classroom discussion while the discussion is going on. But they can also be used to exchange email or instant messages, view pornography, play games, do any of a wide variety of things unrelated to and distracting from what is supposed to be going on in the classroom.

I recently had the pleasure of sitting in on a class taught by a colleague who did a brilliant job of keeping his students' interest and attention—and mine—while covering material usually considered less than entrancing. I was at the back of the classroom and so could see quite a lot of laptop screens. With one or two brief exceptions there was no color on them, which I took as evidence that they were being used to take notes, not to browse the web or play games.

It occurred to me that the question of whether to permit students to use laptops connected to the web during class was merely a new variant on the older question of whether class attendance should be compulsory. In this context as in others, the net lets one be physically in one place, virtually in another, physically attend class while corresponding with your friends or reading the newspaper. There are, of course, other ways of doing that—some of us remember reading concealed books during boring high school classes, or simply retreating into thoughts unrelated to what we were supposed to be learning—but the new technology provides a more convenient tool for the purpose.

On the subject of compulsory attendance, I cannot improve on the words of Adam Smith:

No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending, as is well known wherever any such lectures are given. Force and restraint may, no doubt, be in some degree requisite in order to oblige children, or very young boys, to attend to those parts of education which it is thought necessary for them to acquire during that early period of life; but after twelve or thirteen years of age, provided the master does his duty, force or restraint can scarce ever be necessary to carry on any part of education.

(Wealth of Nations Book V Chapter 1 Part 3 Article II)

As demonstrated by my colleague.