Overheard on NPR

As long as the United States stays in the air, the danger of getting drawn into another Black Hawk Down is relatively remote.

Addendum: I understand that the point is a less stupid than the phrasing. In other addenda, have I mentioned my paranoid fantasy? Namely, that the Bush Administration is trying to get the United States bogged down in so many theaters that there will be no choice but to institute a draft.

What! ANOTHER free will thread?!

In comments, Deer -- who inexplicably lacks her own blog^[1] -- pointed out that zefrank took on the question of free will today. Make your own judgment as to what zefrank is getting at, but know that I wholeheartedly agree with what I think he's getting at.

Which brings me to a nutty view that I hold on alternate Thursdays and some of the days in between. Very briefly, the idea is that the emphasis we place on choice and agency is misplaced, and that if we're going to be impressed by something about consciousness then what we ought to be impressed by is apprehension.

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1 CaringBridge doesn't count!

DEVELOPING: USA not only nation for sale

Via Julian Sanchez, I see that Sealand is for sale.

If only I could afford it!

Back in ninth grade I got a D in Geography because I refused to change the topic of my semester report from Sealand to what my teacher referred to as a real country. She focused her argument around the claim that Sealand was utterly inconsequential, but had no adequate response to my objection from Andorra. The impasse was never resolved, except insofar as I got a zero on the assignment.

By these signs you will know it

Hmmm. A chunk of downtown Austin is currenty closed as 'authorities' investigate how dozens of dead birds ended up near the capitol. Tests for natural gas and chlorine have come up negative.

More info as it develops. If you don't hear from me, assume that Austin is in an information quarantine.

Bachelor cooking 101

Actual directions for cooking a hot pocket:

Unwrap product & insert into crisping sleeve.

Place on a paper plate & microwave on HIGH

Remove from crisping sleeve & cool for 2 minutes.

Discard sleeve.

Emphasis added

I'm wondering whether it's ok to throw away the paper plate.

This is The Bellman's 700th post since switching to blogger

It's about time for a blog crash!

Anyway, the actual point of the post is that I made the mistake of following a link to Powerline, and read:

Tony Snow did a press briefing today, and the reporters once again wanted to obsess on Saddam Hussein's execution. Not on the fact that justice was finally done, after Saddam tormented and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocents, over a period of thirty years. No! The focus of the press corps' rage was the fact that, for a moment before he dropped through the trap door, Saddam was taunted. Maybe there is some parallel universe in which this makes sense, but I doubt it. I think these journalists are stark, raving mad.

Actually, Rocket-boy John is stark, raving stupid. He's so dumb that he can't even understand the basics of the problem as presented. The U.S. press corp hasn't suddenly developed a thirst for justice when it comes to the treatment of Saddam.

Perhaps John should read some Hitchens, like he used to

Sasuke!

This afternoon I came across a nine minute clip of Makoto Nagano's triumphant run through all four stages, but now I can't find it. So here's a short clip of a guy trying to run the first course in a suit.

logorrheic

[Neologism origin: 1900–05; 'logo-', word or speech + '-rrhea', flow or discharge]

n.
1. Speech which is pathologically incoherent, often as a result of repetition.
2. Incessant or compulsive talkativeness; wearisome volubility.

Dark night of the frizbanontosity (free-will thread number 3)

Julian Sanchez thinks I don't take my disbelief in free will seriously enough. He may be right... I take very few things seriously enough.

Seriously, though, this is a false dichotomy:

Jason is focused on how bad things look if (as is probably not the case) the universe is fully deterministic: Our actions are scripted, and what we think are our choices are merely the upshot of impersonal, immutable physical laws playing out. But as philosophers have long observed, indeterminism doesn't seem to leave us in a much more satisfactory situation. Perhaps some of my actions are influenced by the probabilistic behavior of quantum particles that make up my brain, say. But this would just make my actions random, not free: They escape the shackles of causality at the cost of coming unmoored from agency, from a connection with my reasons and motives.

There's a third option that Julian probably considers too ridiculous to mention, and that is that my actions are the result of something at is a) not the result of any understood causality, and b) is still moored to agency. It is pure agency, in which I am the cause of many things.

This unlikely piece of a human being--that has agency free from prior cause--used to be called "the soul." Athiests reject it, I myself find it highly improbable, and Julian may argue that it is incoherent. I might even agree with him.

However, incoherent or not, it is the underpinning of all of our traditional conceptions of agency, and, I might add, is still a widely-used concept among everyone except philosophers.

The claim that consciousness is an "illusion" suggests a helpful analogy. There's a clear sense in which a convincing holographic image can be described as an illusion. On the other hand, it's still a real hologram. Whether it's apt to describe it as illusory will depend on your background beliefs about what you're looking at. Am "I" "really" "deciding" what words to write just now? Well, sure, in the same sense that when my laptop carries out a floating point operation, the "computer" is "really doing" a "calculation." Once you stop fantasizing about heaven, you tend to find the world we have is enough.

The first part of this paragraph really baffles me. A real hologram of a woman is not a real woman, just a real hologram. That is an important distinction, regardless of one's background beliefs.

But the last sentence of the paragraph is where the rubber meets the road. A very valid question to ask about my point of view is what the impact on my behavior should be. And I don't have a good answer. If I'm right, I'm not even sure it's a meaningful question.

Bonus: At the end of his post, Julian links approvingly to Will Wilkinson's list of easy answers to hard questions. About free will, Wilkinson writes,

It is frequently possible to have done other than what we did in fact do.

Whatever. I won't believe that until someone provides three examples.

(I tried simply commenting at Julian's lounge, but my comment vanished into pre-approval ether. Perhaps it will surface at some point, although I think this post is more complete.)

A game played with a bat and ball by two opposing teams of nine players

Less than a week to go until the baseball hall of fame balloting results are announced, and the tension is palpable.

Seriously, it's totally palpable.

Anyway, I agree with Mike Sullivan that Cal Ripkin, Jr. and Tony Gwynn are shoe-ins, and that Mark McGwire doesn't have a snowball's chance. The interesting action comes when you look down the ballot at the top returning vote getters. Here are the top five players returning from last year's ballot:

Name	Votes	Pct
Jim Rice	337	64.8
Goose Gossage	336	64.6
Andre Dawson	317	61.0
Bert Blyleven	277	53.3
Lee Smith	234	45.0

[source]


The requirement for election is that a player must appear on 75% of ballots cast. There were 520 ballots cast last year, so that works out to 390 votes. As you can see, Rice and Gossage are both right on the cusp.

Here's part of what Sullivan had to say about Rice, the returning player with the highest vote total:

The attitudes toward Rice have softened over the years, as is evident by his vote total last year. He received 337 votes, good for 64.8 percent but just short of the required 75 percent. Working in Rice's favor is the historical fact that nobody has ever gotten such a high vote total without eventually getting in.

I happen to think that all five of those players deserve election, but unlike Sullivan (I think), I don't believe that any of them will make it this year. The simple reason is that the voters are extremely unlikely to induct more than two players in any given year -- the last time it happened was 1991 -- and this year there are more than two newly eligible players deserving election.

Those high vote totals for Rice and Gossage are probably explained by the fact that last year there weren't any strong candidates among those in their first year of eligibility. The world having turned, their totals will probably drop this year. There is, though, hope for the future. The only sure-fire hall of famer arriving on to the ballot in the next couple of years is Rickey Henderson in 2009, so there should be room to elect a few borderline guys next year or the year after.

Hey hell I pay the price

Near the end of an article reporting scientific evidence for the claim that employees work more efficiently when paired with more efficient co-workers, Slate's Tim Harford throws this in:

There are, broadly, two explanations. One is that workers are spurred to greater efforts when contemplating the superior speed of their colleague. This is psychologically plausible but economically irrational. A more cynical explanation is that workers do not like it when faster colleagues are looking at them, because they fear being accused of slacking off. |Slate|

What the evidence showed was that there was a strong correllation between increased efficiency and falling under the gaze of a relatively more efficient worker. Leaving aside Harford's guesses about the underlying psychology, I don't see what's so cynical about the thought that observation motivates people to work work more efficiently. Sensitivity to the judgements of one's peers, it seems to me, is a necessary condition for the very existence of human civilization.

Two other quick thoughts. First, I think that Harford's valorization of individual contemplation is, as a matter of intellectual history, linked in interesting ways to the free will debate. Without going into detail let me just say that I think that a lot of this goes back to ideas that were introduced aroud the time of the Protestant Reformation. Second, I'd be curious to see what sort of hay feminist scholars can make of this line of research. My own experience is that when you start talking about the male gaze to the uninitiated they roll their eyes, so it would be helpful to be able to cite scientists rather than theorists when making assertions about the coercive effects of a gaze.

Dumb-game blogging

We haven't had a lot of dumb games of late, so let me introduce Bowman Prelude. I recommend reading the help screens before starting, or at the very least, switching to Auto Aim as soon as you begin. Let me know if any of you crack level 30... I'm stuck.

Free will thread number 2

Despite what a compatabilist would argue, if determinism is true, it truly doesn't matter what you think or do.

Julian Sanchez is discussing a very weak type of determinism (in which our desires and methods of reason are affected by extrinsic forces). I believe in "true," or at least stronger, determinism, in which the very idea of free will is an illusion. We are nothing more than wind-up machines and there is no way to choose anything other than what you are about to choose.

To my mind, this renders all human endeavors to be somewhat of a bad joke. What's the point in punishing someone for doing something when there is really no free agent there who "did" that thing? What's the point of even having this conversation? You may be compelled to respond, but just keep in mind that "you" don't exist. You are a living, breathing player piano. There is no changing your tune.

Someone with a computer bigger than the universe and enough data about where you started out could predict not only the moment of your death, but also the exact thought process that will lead you to choose cheerios over wheaties tomorrow morning. Of course, someone with those sorts of resources would already know that their own consciousness was simply an illusion and would probably use those resources to take a long vacation instead.

The only refuges from this bleak view appear to be new science and old religion, and I don't hold out much hope for either.

That settles it

Hey look! These two recent articles have prompted a couple of prominent bloggers to post about the philosophical problem of Free Will. As Julian points out, it's more or less an orthodoxy among philosophers these days to think that the truth of determinism offers no threat to the notion of responsibility. For those of you who love teh jargon, this position is called compatibilism.

Lots of non-philosophers, not having been conditioned to accept the orthodoxies of the field, find compatibilism to be counter-intuitive. So, consider one of the ways that we often read tragic literature. On the reading I am thinking of, the protagonist's actions, and eventually his fall, arise inexorably from features of his character which are pre-set and beyond his control. Everything that happens is, to put it another way, determined. And yet we don't find that the predictability of it all detracts from our inclination to see the character as responsible for his actions.

Since Jason admitted in comments some time ago that one of his beloved views is that the universe is deterministic, I'm sure this will lead to an exciting comment thread.

To serve man

Federal officials say it was probably just some weird weather phenomenon, but a group of United Airlines employees swear they saw a mysterious, saucer-shaped craft hovering over O'Hare Airport in November.

The workers, some of them pilots, said the object didn't have lights and hovered over an airport terminal before shooting up through the clouds, according to a report in Monday's Chicago Tribune.

The Federal Aviation Administration acknowledged that a United supervisor had called the control tower at O'Hare, asking if anyone had spotted a spinning disc-shaped object. But the controllers didn't see anything, and a preliminary check of radar found nothing out of the ordinary, FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said.

"Our theory on this is that it was a weather phenomenon," Cory said. "That night was a perfect atmospheric condition in terms of low (cloud) ceiling and a lot of airport lights. When the lights shine up into the clouds, sometimes you can see funny things."

The FAA is not investigating, Cory said. |CNN|

The semiotics of the execution

Aside from my universal opposition to the death penalty, I don't much care what happened to Saddam Hussein or his remains, at least not for Saddam's sake. However, for the sake of Iraq and the success of that country, I need to ask:

Why aren't his executioners wearing some sort of uniform?

Shouldn't they be wearing the uniform of the Iraq army or police? These guys are dressed like thugs, like members of a death squad. Which, I suppose, is their uniform. They are in the uniform of the Muslim extremists who have been kidnapping and executing people in the name of Islam. The only way they could look more like our enemies is if they wore robes and, instead of hanging Saddam, they beheaded him.

2007 begins with a big "WTF?"

I don't know what to say about Darrent Williams getting killed in a drive-by shooting this morning, except to say that it really tempers my happiness about Denver's loss yesterday and the resultant playoff slot for my hapless Kansas City Chiefs. There is no information about what actually motivated the shooter at this point (or if he/she even knew who was in the hummer that got sprayed) but I can't help but think of Columbian soccer casualty Andres Escobar. If it's anything like that, Denver fans are going to get a whole new scary reputation.