Returns to Like-Mindedness and Diversity

I’m spending this week at a seminar put on by the Institute for Humane Studies, which involves people listening to lectures on lots of topics from a libertarian perspective and drinking free beer.  It is odd being in a place where most people around me also love to talk about economics and libertarianism, since the vast majority of Americans are not libertarians or economics majors.  But is this newfound consensus a good thing?

In some ways its great; conversations can flow at a much higher level when you can presume that most participants have taken the same classes and read the same books.  There aren’t many other places people laugh at my “how many Austrian economists does it take to screw in a light bulb?” jokes.

On the other hand, there is the potential for “groupthink”, the lack of imagination and the lazy arguments that are so easy to succumb to when there is no real live person to represent opposing views.  So a diversity of opinion can be good just to keep everyone on their intellectual best behavior.

But there can be a greater benefit to diversity than merely avoiding groupthink.  Sometimes the interplay between varying ideas allows great progress to be made; there can be an intellectual division of labor and specialization.  Richard Feynman said that other physicists thought him a math genius, but in reality he was not better at math than them, he just had a different approach; and though their approaches may be equally good on the whole, they would only come to him with problems to which their approach had failed.  There’s no reason this can’t apply in economics, or even to some extent in political philosophy.

Another way of thinking about this is the diminishing marginal returns of a political philosophy; perhaps a conservative could come here and argue libertarians out of the worst 10% of their ideas, or vice-versa in the real political world if a minority of libertarians can keep the worst 10% of the ruling party’s ideas from becoming policy.

4th of July Ideas- Celebrate with Style

Here are some ideas I’ve come up with.  I look forward to hearing some others from you.

1) Tea Party (the drinking kind)- Throw a tea party.  But instead of tea, serve coffee with a dash of Kentucky bourbon.  And instead of crumpets, use deep-fried apple pies.  Then watch an appropriate movie like 1776, the Patriot, or Red Dawn.

2) Tea Party (the ship-attacking kind)- What is the modern equivalent of highly taxed tea in British ships?  I would say supertankers filled with oil from OPEC countries.  We don’t need their oil!  Take over a ship and dump its oil in the harbor! (ok, perhaps we should find a more water-soluble product to feel oppressed by)

3) Down with the Brits!- Take over your nearest British consulate or embassy, then present the British government with a document detailing their “long train of  abuses” and a list of your demands.  If you’re feeling really ambitious, kidnap the royal family instead.

4) Fight for our Freedom- on a more serious note, the real restrictions on our freedoms nowadays don’t come from the British or from foreign enemies; they come from ourselves and our government.  The 4th is a great day to work to protect existing liberties and regain new ones.  Donate your time or money to a liberty-enhancing think tank, legal foundation, political action committee, or other NGO (say, Wikileaks).  If this constructive approach to enhancing liberty sounds too boring or difficult, you can simply celebrate in classic style by breaking some oppressive laws- like those against fireworks and marijuana!

Happy 4th to all however you celebrate.  I spend much of the year thinking about how the country could be better but its nice to think every once in a while about how good things already are.

Devil’s Dictionary, Revised Edition

Blogger (n): A creature which ingests information and excretes blog posts.

Mini Biographies

1) The Great Zucchini: How to make six figures while working two days a week with a high-school education. Plus: the dark side. Great reporting/writing.

2) A Profile of Andrew Sullivan: I knew from his blog that his life, both personally and intellectually, was interesting and a bit contradictory; but this story truly makes the reader wonder if it could all be describing a single person.

3) A Hagiography of Larry Summers: Definitely a puff piece, but it does make him sounds perfectly suited to his current job; and as Dr. Horn says, given who his parents and his uncles were he had no chance of living a gaffe-free life among ordinary people.  My favorite part of the piece is Summers’ quote about why he chose to be an economist:

During his senior year of college, Summers was considering graduate school in both theoretical physics and economics. For weeks, he anguished over whether to pursue his passion (physics) or the family business (in addition to his economist parents, Summers has two uncles–Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow–who won Nobel prizes in the field). After he finally decided on the latter, he explained his thinking to Rollins: “What does a bad theoretical physicist do for a living? He walks into an office, sits at a desk, and stares at a plain white sheet of paper.” “But,” Summers added, “there’s a lot of work in the world for a bad economist.”

4) John Rawls: On My Religion gives insights into the mind of the most influential political philosopher of recent times.  Apparently Rawls was at one point quite religious and considered attending a seminary to study for the Episcopal priesthood.

Some Ideas

1) A big list of unsolved problems. Doesn’t seeing them like that make you want to solve them just to check them off, forgetting the benefits to humanity and the Nobel prize?

2) A debate over complicated, abstract ideas carried out by hundreds of people over decades. Sound hard to understand? Its not so bad if you just look at the map. I had this debate-mapping idea myself but had not done anything with it; I’d like to see lots more of these done, in a slightly different format.

3) According to Time, Rumsfeld failed at counter-insurgency not because it was so inherently difficult but because he simply wasn’t trying very hard. This seems shocking but based on other things I’ve read it is certainly plausible and probably true.

4) Dredge the entirety of New York Harbor. You’ll be rich, an environmental hero, and solve a lot of lingering mysteries.

Do Sanctions Strengthen Oppressive Regimes?

Lots of anecdotal evidence suggests that the Castros, at least, believe they do.

Equimarginal Fail

Consider, for example, that the 2009 budget for homeland security (the folks that protect us from terrorists) will likely be about $50 billion. Don’t get us wrong, we like the fact that people are trying to prevent terrorism, but even at its absolute worst, terrorists killed about 3,000 Americans in a single year. And less than 100 Americans are killed by terrorists in most years. By contrast, the budget for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (the folks who protect us on the road) is about $1 billion, even though more than 40,000 people will die this year on the nation’s roads. In terms of dollars spent per fatality, we fund terrorism prevention at about $17,000,000/fatality (i.e., $50 billion/3,000 fatalities) and accident prevention at about $25,000/fatality (i.e., $1 billion/40,000 fatalities).

…. To the extent that we do try to prevent scary things from happening, we should put forth more effort to prevent real dangers like car accidents, heart attacks, and diabetes. Interestingly, many of the real dangers are things that we have a lot of control over (unlike mass murder). Therefore, to the extent that we try to prevent them, we might actually improve our quality of life.

Thats from Psychology Today.

(HT: KPC)

A small step toward a much better world

The website Wikileaks is currently down.  They recently broke the story of the list of websites banned by the Australian government, and their bandwidth has been overloaded by peoples’ interest.

Wikileaks allows little people to get information indicting powerful organizations in to the view of the larger world.  They protect the anonymity of their sources, and by locating servers in many countries and having extensive legal defense help they can keep stories up despite the opposition of governments.  Almost no case is too big or too small for them to handle.

But they have run out of money.

I can’t think of any other way a small donation could go further toward promoting freedom for individuals and transparency and accountability for institutions.  Freedom isn’t free, but this is your chance to buy it cheap!

Nuclear Nazi Assassin: Making Maine look good

My native Maine seems to produce about a story a year featuring backwoods types who do really messed up things, but this story blows away all the others.

Apparently a wannabe-Nazi living in Belfast was building a dirty bomb to set off at the Presidential Inauguration, but was murdered by a vigilante (his wife?).

The only thing more bizarre than the story is that almost no media outlets have picked it up, despite the fact that the story broke in early February.

But read up at Wikileaks and the Bangor Daily News for a glimpse into a dangerous bizarro world.

Wikileaks speculates that the story hasn’t spread because it doesn’t fit with anyone’s political agenda, but that doesn’t seem like enough.  Any thoughts?  Are reporters outside of Maine and the blogosphere just that bad at their jobs?

Fear the Enviro-Pirates

I had never heard of the Sea Shepherd conservation society and was pretty incredulous when I was pointed to their history.  They sound like a super-hardcore version of Greenpeace, and indeed they were founded as a splinter group of Greenpeace.

One of the most hardcore parts of their story, additionally interesting for showing that radical environmentalists are not all Commies, was when they bombed the Soviet spy ship with paint and threatening messages.  Bombed, from a plane.  Generally lots of naval warfare and trouble with authorities.