Miscellany

From DemWatch, Atrios, Volokh, and a million other places, we hear about the uplifting piece of scripture that Tom DeLay chose to read at the Congressional Prayer Service on January 5th:

A reading of the Gospel, in Matthew 7:21 through 27.

Not every one who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven; but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.

Many will say to me on that day, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? Did we not drive out demons in your name? Did we not do mighty deeds in your name?”

Then I will declare to them solemnly, “I never knew you: depart from me, you evil doers.”

Everyone who listens to these words of mine, and acts on them, will be like a wise man, who built his house on a rock:

The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew, and buffeted the house, but it did not collapse; it has been set solidly on rock.

And everyone who listens to these words of mine, but does not act on them, will be like a fool who built his house on sand:

The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew, and buffeted the house, and it collapsed and was completely ruined.

The poor Congressman is taking some grief for his choice of text, due to what some perceive as insensitivity towards the victims of the actual tsunami that knocked down quite a few houses.

The problem seems to be that DeLay is blaming the victims for this terrible catastrophe — if they had listened to Jesus, this never would have happened. I should point out that, well, that’s because it’s true, at least if you believe that God is in charge of the natural world. God (or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, I can’t always keep track) could easily have prevented this disaster, but chose not to. And for an all-powerful being, it’s hard to distinguish between “chose not to prevent” and “caused.” So it would be equally legitimate (and less dependent on theological fine points) to say that DeLay’s choice of text puts the blame squarely on God’s shoulders, for having such a maliciously petty approach to being omnipotent.

On Morning Edition this morning, Barbara Bradley Hagerty spoke to representatives from various faiths about the meaning of this disaster in the light of God. I only heard snippets, but the commentators were at least admirably consistent, choosing not to weasel out of the obvious conclusion. The Muslim agreed that, yes, the fact that Allah chose to do this meant that there was some very good reason why those people had to suffer and die; we might not know what it is, but presumably they did something bad. The Protestant was more in the Enlightenment tradition of egocentric individuality, choosing to interpret the tsunami as God’s way of telling him, personally, to shape up. Not a comforting thought to the actual victims, but at least intellectually honest.

Of course, it is also true that DeLay is an insensitive jerk. Just because his God is petulant and vindictive doesn’t mean he has to rub it in our faces.

In case you aren’t listening to NPR or watching C-SPAN (or reading Human Rights First), Pandagon provides a nice paraphrase (N.B.: just a paraphrase, not a transcript!) of Patrick Leahy’s noble attempts to squeeze a straight answer out of future Attorney General Alberto Gonzales:

LEAHY: “Does U.S. law allow for torture, in your opinion?”

GONZALES: “Bush has already said there won’t be any torture.”

LEAHY: “That’s not what I asked. In your opinion, does U.S. law allow for torture?”

GONZALES: “That’s a hypothetical question that I won’t answer.”

LEAHY: “U.S. law. Torture.”

GONZALES: “That involves a lot of complex law that I don’t know.”

Joe Biden also said something sensible (you’re nominated for Attorney General, not the Supreme Court, so you can’t actually weasel out of giving us your opinions), but is such a pompous jerk that he does more harm than good to his own case.

Update: This guy claims not to have a view about whether Senate filibusters are constitutional. And he wants to be Attorney General?

It’s funny to hear the Republicans throw softballs. “Judge, do you think terrorism is bad?” Or course, for most nominees, “Do you think torture is bad?” would qualify as a softball.

Update again: Gonzales slipped for a moment and actually answered a question. Asked if he thought the President had the right to ignore a law that he personally suspected was unconstitutional, he said “Yes.” Nobody asked the obvious follow-up, whether we should consider changing the title “President” to “God-Emperor.”

Last update: I hadn’t realized that the Justice department finally backed off its classification of torture as unacceptable only when the interrogator intentionally inflicted pain on the order of major organ failure or death. A new memo has been issued that takes a wider view of what is unacceptable. Of course, it came out last week, which is more than two years after the original memo. But just in time for the Gonzales hearings!

If you want info on the new FBI reports expressing shock at the torture going on at Guantanamo Bay, see articles at Newsweek and the ACLU.

In the Comments, Kriston very naturally wonders whether I was perhaps exaggerating about the President’s divine right to declare laws unconstitutional. Nope. I haven’t found a transcript, but Gonzales repeated this belief again later, so it wasn’t a slip. Here a quote from the Human Rights First site, which is not the most clear but gives you the gist:

Gonzales – The Executive branch should always look with great care at a law before it decides that law is unconstitutional and should not be followed.

Many of us had thought that was the Judicial branch’s job. But hey, if they look with great care, what more can we ask?

I was happy to notice via Crooked Timber that Steve Hsu, I physicist I know from way back, has begun to blog. He’s in the physics department at the University of Oregon, although many of his posts are about economics and finance.

Steve links with approval to an article entitled Don’t Become a Scientist!, by Jonathan Katz. Professor Katz is pretty straightforward about what he means by this dramatic statement:

Are you thinking of becoming a scientist? Do you want to uncover the mysteries of nature, perform experiments or carry out calculations to learn how the world works? Forget it!

Science is fun and exciting. The thrill of discovery is unique. If you are smart, ambitious and hard working you should major in science as an undergraduate. But that is as far as you should take it. After graduation, you will have to deal with the real world. That means that you should not even consider going to graduate school in science. Do something else instead: medical school, law school, computers or engineering, or something else which appeals to you.

Why am I (a tenured professor of physics) trying to discourage you from following a career path which was successful for me? Because times have changed (I received my Ph.D. in 1973, and tenure in 1976). American science no longer offers a reasonable career path. If you go to graduate school in science it is in the expectation of spending your working life doing scientific research, using your ingenuity and curiosity to solve important and interesting problems. You will almost certainly be disappointed, probably when it is too late to choose another career.

That must be depressing to read for a young person who is considering embarking on the long and difficult road to becoming a professional scientist. A brief perusal of his web page reveals that Professor Katz is something of a nutcake, with other essays like In Defense of Homophobia and Diversity is the Last Refuge of a Scoundrel. Nevertheless, is there anything to his career advice?

The facts of the case are not in dispute: there are many more people who would like to become scientists, even among those who have made it as far as graduate school, than there are jobs for them as professional scientists. (Really here we are thinking of jobs as professors at universities, not working for industry, and the problem is equal or worse in other areas of academia.) The numbers will depend sensitively on how you define the problem, but I’ve heard that perhaps one in four people who get a Ph.D. will eventually become a professor, and that seems plausible.

Why would anyone go through years of extremely hard work (four years of undergrad, perhaps five of grad school, about four or five of postdoc on average, not to mention another six before you come up for tenure) just to have such a small chance of winning what appears to be a somewhat modest prize? It’s like aiming to become a professional athlete, except without the lavish riches, celebrity status, or the esteem of the opposite sex. One must conclude that people only embark on this path because they care deeply about doing science. Should we really be telling those people that they should hang it up, their efforts are a waste of time?

No. Of course we should tell them the truth — there aren’t many positions available, even for people with doctorates from prestigious graduate schools. But in my experience that is hardly a secret — the lesson is driven home again and again, in conversations with other students as well as with faculty. Maybe I’m wrong, but I haven’t heard any professors spinning tales of how easy it is to get a faculty job. There is some tension, of course, because we do try to recruit students to come to our own schools, or to join our groups rather than some other one. But as far as I can tell, such a student would have to live in an especially well-sealed cave to achieve a Ph.D. without having heard about how bad the job market is. And if they do understand how difficult it is, and want to try anyway, then more power to them.

In the face of an unfortunate situation, it’s nice to be able to blame somebody. Who can we blame for the fact that there are fewer jobs than people who get Ph.D.’s? Perhaps there should be more jobs. That would be great, but runs into the fairly prosaic problem of how to pay for it. Double college tuitions? The number of faculty positions is slowly growing, but I don’t see any way to make it grow so fast that it outstrips the number of people who would like to have one.

Maybe we can blame graduate schools, for accepting all of these students even though there aren’t guaranteed jobs waiting for them? I’ve actually heard people express this view in all seriousness. But let’s think about it. What is actually being suggested is to simply accept far fewer applicants to grad school, i.e. to reject half or more of the students we currently take. And this is supposed to benefit these students? “Yes, we understand that you wanted to go to graduate school, but for your own good we’ve decided not to let you get a Ph.D. It’s true, you might have been one of the fortunate ones to get a job, or you might have led a fulfilling life outside of academia, but in our judgment the odds are against you. Someday you’ll thank us.”

It’s hard to get a job as a science professor, or just about any other kind of professor. And it’s heartbreaking to go through years of effort and not achieve that goal. But not letting people try is not the answer. Nor is discouraging anyone who might want to pursue the dream of being a scientist. We should be relentlessly honest — it’s a hard road, and many will ultimately not succeed. But in my experience, this fact is pretty obvious, not at all hidden. And if someone understands this and wants to try anyway, they should be encouraged as much as possible. I have the best job in the world, and it wouldn’t be right to tell someone else they shouldn’t pursue the same path if that’s where their passion leads them.

Okay, so you have some really important, super-secret data you want to store. This stuff is so good (maybe illegally good) that you worry about it being compromised by the snoopy government or voracious competitors. Where can you keep your data where it will be completely safe? I suggest the principality of Sealand. (Photo copyright Kim Gilmour.)

During WWII, Britain constructed “sea forts” as a way of protecting the coast line against German air attacks. After the war they were abandoned, and eventually torn down, except for one — Fort Roughs Tower. It was (and is) basically a platform situated on two huge pillars, that sat there slowly rusting. At least, until 1967, when radio pirate Paddy Roy Bates and his friends occupied the structure as a base from which to broadcast to the UK. Never one to think small, Bates declared the fort an independent country, dubbed it Sealand, and named himself Prince. (See history at Wikipedia and an article at Wired.)

Sealand has had a colorful history, including an attempted coup and a small war. But the radio piracy business isn’t what it used to be, and the primary venture on Sealand is now HavenCo, a manager of “secure servers.” Basically, the Sealand government makes very few awkward demands on the HavenCo management, as they are essentially identical.

The entrepreneurs claim that they don’t want to get involved with truly outlandish illegal activities, child pornography and the like. But if you’d like to manage a few anonymous transactions, HavenCo might be the way to go. I’ll be sure to look into it once I get Preposterous Universe to turn a profit.

To answer a question I had some time back (although probably not just because of that), the text of David Politzer’s Nobel Lecture is now up on his web page. The provocative title is “The Dilemma of Attribution,” but the lecture itself isn’t by any means outrageous. It’s a look at the history of the ideas of QCD and asymptotic freedom from Politzer’s personal perspective, with a strong emphasis on giving credit to absolutely everyone. It’s an important task, as the actual history is inevitably messy, and there is an irresistible temptation to clean them up in the retelling.

As teachers of the next generation of scientists, we always seek to compress and simplify all the developments that have come before. We want to bring our students as quickly as possible to the frontier of current understanding. From this perspective, the actual history, which involves many variants and many missteps, is only a hindrance. And the neat, linear progress, as outlined by the sequence of gleaming gems recognized by Nobel prizes, is a useful fiction. But a fiction it is. The truth is often far more complicated. Of course, there are the oft-told priority disputes, bickering over who is responsible for some particular idea. But those questions are not only often unresolvable, they are often rather meaningless. Genuinely independent discovery is not only possible, it occurs all the time. Sometimes a yet harder problem in the prize selection process is to identify what is the essential or most important idea in some particular, broader context. So it’s not just a question of who did it, i.e., who is responsible for the work, but what “it” is. I.e., what is the significant “it” that should stand as a symbol for a particularly important advance.

Politzer explains vividly the diverse contributions that went into the discovery of asymptotic freedom. But he also believes, I think correctly, that the final result from him and Gross and Wilczek really was the event that deserved the Prize, even if it was “just getting a minus sign right” (the strong force grows weaker at short distances rather than stronger), and indeed a sign that some other people already had calculated. Putting it into the right context, and appreciating its fundamental significance, created the moment in which people finally understood that QCD was the correct theory of the strong interactions.

Update: Another line worth quoting —

I must say that I do regard theoretical physics as a fundamentally parasitic profession, living off the labors of the real physicists.

Happy New Year!

I grew up outside Philly, so naturally I watched a lot of Fat Albert, which has now been made into a movie. (An awful one, apparently, but that’s to be expected.) The cartoon kids from the TV series are swept through a rip in spacetime connected through little Doris’ TV set, to re-appear as live characters in the real world. (I guess they figured out how to violate the null energy condition.)

Roger Ebert, reviewing the movie, raises a question:

And I was wondering, as I always do with plot devices like this, why the human characters deal so calmly with the appearance of toons. Yes, Doris is surprised when the Fat Albert gang pops through her TV set, but isn’t that event more than just … surprising? Isn’t it incredibly amazing? When the laws of the physical universe as we know them are fundamentally violated, shouldn’t it be for more earthshaking purposes than to cheer up Doris?

Okay, I know this one. Yes, it is incredibly surprising. It’s surprising (“it” meaning the appearance of cartoon characters in the real world) because it would never happen. Trust me on that, I’m a scientist. So, it’s hard to reliably answer the question “How would someone react if they saw cartoon characters come to life?” because the hypothesis is contrary to possibility. If we’re going to make movies in which Fat Albert squeezes through the TV and into our bedroom, it’s okay to pass through a brief period of modest surprise before we move onto the wacky hijinks, because the only possible realistic response would involve an hour and a half of stunned disbelief, possibly enlivened by a descent into stark raving madness. Which would be, at minimum, quite a different movie, not really Cosby material at all.

And on that note, let’s wish everyone a happy 2005. It can’t help but be an improvement over its predecessor.

Chris C. Mooney mentions something that certainly surprised me — the NBA’s New Orleans Hornets begin each home game with a prayer. Not just the team, the whole arena — the prayer is read over the loudspeakers by someone standing at center court. Since the Hornets are not a government institution, they certainly have a right to hold a prayer, but it seems obnoxious, as there are certainly plenty of non-religious people, or devotees of different religions, in the crowd for each game.

Apparently New Orleans is the only NBA franchise to have a prayer before each game. Among other things, the prayers ask for success for the Hornets and the NFL’s Saints. This gives us a nice chance to check on how useful it is to ask for divine intervention. Here are the current NBA standings:

PhoenixSuns          24  4   .857 

SanAntonioSpurs      23  6   .793 

SeattleSupersonics   20  6   .769 

MiamiHeat            23  7   .767  

DallasMavericks      19 10   .655 

SacramentoKings      17  9   .654 

MinnesotaT-wolves    16 10   .615 

ClevelandCavaliers   17 11   .607  

OrlandoMagic         15 11   .577  

WashingtonWizards    15 11   .577  

LALakers             15 12   .556 

DetroitPistons       14 12   .538  

NYKnicks             15 13   .536  

IndianaPacers        13 13   .500  

PortlandTrailBlazers 13 13   .500 

Philadelphia76ers    13 14   .481  

DenverNuggets        13 15   .464 

HoustonRockets       13 15   .464 

LAClippers           12 14   .462 

BostonCeltics        12 15   .444  

MemphisGrizzlies     13 17   .433 

UtahJazz             11 17   .393 

NJNets               10 17   .370 

GSWarriors           10 18   .357 

ChicagoBulls          9 17   .346  

TorontoRaptors       10 20   .333 

MilwaukeeBucks        8 16   .333 

CharlotteBobcats      7 17   .292 

AtlantaHawks          5 22   .185 

NOrleansHornets       2 25   .074 

Goodness, all that praying doesn’t seem to be helping very much. Where is God-Man when you need Him?

Richard Posner, guest-blogging for Brian Leiter (here and here, with an introduction by Leiter here), lives up to his image as a practical, hard-headed guy. He basically says that people have fixed ideas of right and wrong, and all the philosophical pondering in the world isn’t going to change their minds. And thank goodness, by his lights:

[T]he sort of political discussion in which political philosophers, law professors, and other intellectuals engage is neither educative nor edifying; I also think it is largely inconsequential, and I am grateful for that fact. I think that what moves people in deciding between candidates and platforms and so on certainly includes facts (such as the collapse of communism — a tremendous fact), as well as a variety of “nonrational” factors, such as whom you like to hang out with –I think that’s extremely important in the choice of a political party to affiliate with. When a brilliant philosopher like Rawls gets down to the policy level and talks about abortion and campaign financing and the like, you recognize a perfectly conventional liberal and you begin to wonder whether his philosophy isn’t just elaborate window dressing for standard left liberalism.

Over at Crooked Timber, Jon Mandle gives what I think is a good response:

But Rawls’s approach to moral reflection — and what he would count as a compelling reason –– s quite different. Moral reflection is not about devising arguments to get other people to switch over to the position that you already hold. It is to help you figure out where you should be.

…

[I]f we are in the position that Rawls imagines — with many internal conflicts and uncertainties — his opens up room for another project: trying to get our moral beliefs right. In pursuing that goal, it makes sense to try to construct arguments from our most secure beliefs (what Rawls calls “provisional fixed points”) to conclusions regarding issues we are much less certain about. (The fixed points are provisional because even they are not in principle immune from possible revision.) In this context, a compelling argument is not one that could move anyone like an irresistible force, but rather one that we judge to provide good support for its conclusion — valid inferences from premises we have a high degree of confidence in.

Actually I think that Mandle is conceding a bit too much. He is basically saying that the role of philosophy is to help us sort out our personal moral beliefs, even if there is little hope for convincing anyone else to change their minds. That seems a little too defeatist. Convincing other people is difficult, but it does sometimes happen, and sometimes even for good, rational reasons. It doesn’t necessarily happen — even two perfectly rational people may disagree about matters of morality, whereas they better not disagree on the solutions to a certain differential equation — but it can happen, and it’s worth trying.

The point is that there are no fixed moral truths upon which we can all agree with metaphysical certitude, but there nevertheless are pre-existing feelings that each of us has about what is right and what is wrong (basically Rawls’ provisional fixed points). Some of these feelings might even be opinions that we might want to think of as conclusions of arguments rather than axiomatic starting points, but they are nevertheless the launching-points for our moral reasoning. The job of moral philosophy is to sort them out and shoot for some kind of consistency. But, even though these points are not given as fixed external truths (and might arise from random formative events, religious influences, or even biological predispositions), we are fortunate enough that different people do not have completely non-overlapping ideas to begin with. Most of us have a great deal in common in our moral beliefs, even if we can’t achieve perfect unanimity.

It’s this degree of overlap (“consensus” would probably be too strong a word) that allows us to make some progress in reasoning with each other. And I would claim that careful philosophizing can help us come to better degrees of agreement, as well as helping us to rationalize our individual moral judgments. It happens all the time that two or more people agree on some basic truths, but end up disagreeing on some specific policy conclusions; in such cases, academic philosophy can be helpful. It’s certainly completely unfair to imagine that the work of someone like Rawls is just an elaborate justification for a pre-existing set of random beliefs; the starting points for Rawls are very similar to those of most modern welfare-state liberals, so it’s not surprising that they generally end up at the same conclusions, although Rawls’ will be much more thoroughly thought-out and internally consistent. Philosophy isn’t impossible or useless, it’s just hard.

By the way, Posner of course has his own blog with Gary Becker. (Funny that the University of Chicago, generally way behind the curve in anything involving computers, would be so rife with good blogs.) He also authored a one-week diary for Slate, which is both inspirational and depressing. I would be happy to accomplish in any given week what that man does in a typical day.

The earthquake in southern Asia is having a devastating impact, with over 44,000 dead from the quake itself and the ensuing tidal waves. The seismic shift has moved some islands more than twenty meters, and possibly shortened the day by as much as three microseconds.

If you’d like to donate to the victims, World Vision is sending food and survival kits to families affected by the disaster.

Update: a more comprehensive list of ways to help is at the Command Post.