The Ash Twins Blog

Dawkins offers an enjoyable devastation of the jury adjudication process:

[W]hy are twelve jurors preferred to a single judge? Not because they are wiser, more knowledgeable or more practised in the arts of reasoning. Certainly not, and with a vengeance. Think of the astronomical damages awarded by juries in footling libel cases. Think how juries bring out the worst in histrionic, gallery-playing lawyers. Twelve jurors are preferred to one judge only because they are more numerous. Letting a single judge decide a verdict would be like letting a single chick speak for the whole herring gull species. Twelve heads are better than one, because they represent twelve assessments of the evidence.

But for this argument to be valid, the twelve assessments really have to be independent. And of course they are not. Twelve men and women locked in a jury room are like our clutch of twelve gull chicks. Whether they actually imitate each other like chicks, they might. That is enough to invalidate the principle by which a jury might be preferred over a single judge.

In practice, as is well documented and as I remember from the three juries that it has been my misfortune to serve on, juries are massively swayed by one or two vocal individuals. There is also strong pressure to conform to a unanimous verdict, which further undermines the principle of independent data. Increasing the number of jurors doesn’t help, or not much (and not at all in strict principle). What you have to increase is the number of independent verdict-reaching units.

So, what should we do?

I’ll call it the Two Verdicts Concordance Test. It is based on the principle that, if a decision is valid, two independent shots at making it should yield the same result. Just for purposes of the test, we run to the expense of having two juries, listening to the same case and forbidden to talk to members of the other jury. At the end, we lock the two juries in two separate jury rooms and see if they reach the same verdict. If they don’t, nothing can be proved beyond reasonable doubt, and this would cast reasonable doubt on the jury system itself.

I remember hearing about the robot controlled by rat neurons last month, but the details are extraordinary. The machine can learn:

Researchers say the robot, which they nicknamed Gordon, can learn behavior to a certain extent. When it hits a wall, for example, it gets an electrical stimulation from the robot’s sensors. As it confronts similar situations, it learns by habit. To help this process along, the researchers also use different chemicals to reinforce or inhibit the neural pathways that light up during particular actions. Lead researcher Kevin Warwick says that Gordon currently swerves to avoid a wall eight out of 10 times: “The signals and the pathways are strengthening as each action gets repeated.”

The NYTimes has a nice article about the public sphere’s digestion of the first presidential debate and the campaigns’ efforts to manipulate that process.

The positioning was in keeping with what is now a quadrennial rite in which the campaigns go full bore to convince the news media, and ultimately the public, that their candidate won — or more than that, to argue that the debate spotlighted some sort of character or issue defect in their opponent. This often involves highlighting some supposedly fatal mistake by their opponent — the sighs of Al Gore during a 2000 debate; the first President George Bush’s peek at his wristwatch while debating Bill Clinton in 1992.

Economists from all over the world unite in their disapproval of the administration’s bailout plan.

http://www.wnbc.com/news/17539627/detail.html

Today was the first meeting of this semester’s Francis Leiber Colloquium on Law and War. The speaker was Columbia Law Professor Phillip Bobbitt, discussing his new book Terror and Consent. Some parts of the colloquium were informative and engaging, but other parts were remarkable for exemplifying America’s broken discourse on the war on terror.

Constitutional Law Professor Kendall Thomas, after making a helpful distinction between formalist and functionalist conceptions of terrorism, mentioned that “states of consent” have historically engaged in terrorism. He gave an example from Italy, but the most striking aspect of his statement was a prefatory remark in which he said he wouldn’t give an example of the US government supporting or engaging in terrorist acts because he didn’t “want to be polemical.” Even among supposedly leftist Columbia Law professors, admitting that the United States have engaged in acts that could be fairly described as terroristic is considered “polemical”–unnecessarily combative, contentious, or disputatious.

In my question, I asked whether–in light of the $612 billion budgeted for 2009 military operations–we should think about spending some money to facilitate economic growth and opportunity in those underdeveloped areas that breed hatred and resentment toward wealthy Western nations. Prof. Bobbitt did not respond to the dollar figure–nor was it thereafter mentioned. He agreed that the US should aid other countries, but he didn’t think that foreign aid should be part of the counterterrorist strategy. Bobbitt believes that terrorists are not motivated by economic factors or even political factors; when asked what does motivate them, he shrugged and threw his hands up. He doesn’t know what motivates terrorists, and he just doesn’t care to find out. Prof. Bobbitt thinks we should be concerned instead with using laws and military actions to deter and eliminate terrorists.

As “evidence” for his argument that terrorists are irrational and there’s no point in uncovering their motivations, he offered the unfortunate example of Bruce Ivins. Bruce Ivins is the government scientist fingered by the FBI as the anthrax attacker from 2001. But, as documented by Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, Ivins has not been convicted in a court of law (he committed suicide before the case went to trial), and the FBI’s case is gaping with evidentiary holes.

The bad evidence supports a bad argument: Ignoring the motivations of potential terrorists is, in my view, an absolutely horrible idea, even if those motivations oftentimes have nothing to do with poverty. Meanwhile, conditions in Afghanistan appear to support the view that relying on law and military might not be the best solution to the terrorism problem.

The fact that Bobbitt is such a successful scholar (and that Thomas avoided “polemics”) demonstrates the fundamental failure at the heart of the American market of ideas. Ideas do not gain traction through their truth, but rather through their memetic fitness in the current intellectual environment. That environment, as it stands today, is geared toward lubricating the ascension of militaristic, blindly pro-American ideas and rhetoric. Establishmentarian individuals in the public sphere celebrate Bobbitt’s views, improving his scholarly reputation and increasing his book sales. Those who would mention the US’s astounding military budget or its history of abuses are ignored.

Most other questioners focused on insignificant legalisms–about a dozen questions tried to pin down Bobbitt on the difference between a terrorist and a criminal. Bobbitt himself punctured the charade, saying that he was just a lawyer who could define his terms as he saw fit. “Make up your own definitions,” he quipped.

Those questioners didn’t realize that there is no objective conceptual distinction between criminals and terrorists and warriors; these are just useful terms for discussing (and hopefully resolving) real-world social problems.

“Pivot” by Amoeba

Gavin Kennedy of Edinburgh offered a helpful critique of our October 2005 Daily Texan column:

Adam Smith was not ‘led to capitalism’, a phenomenon that appeared several decades after he died in 1790. Even the word ‘capitalism’ was not invented until 1854 (Oxford English Dictionary, Vol.ii: Thackeray); the word ‘capitalist’ was first used in 1792 (A. Young; W. Goldwin, 1793). Smith died in 1790.

Second, capitalism was not ‘devised’, though it has certainly been ‘successful’. This is the most important aspect of the market economy (which Smith wrote about and analysed using his inductive reasoning and not from axiomatic first principles): nobody devised it, created it intentionally, organised it, or managed it. Markets were never dependent on the ‘inventiveness’ of mankind; they evolved without plan or precepts, and still do.

The Wall Street Journal reports that J.P. Morgan has agreed to purchase Washington Mutual.

Federal regulators have been heavily involved in orchestrating the transaction, which comes as WaMu grapples with its bad mortgage loans. Regulators were hoping to fend off a collapse of WaMu, which, with more than $300 billion in assets, would mark by far the largest banking failure in U.S. history.

The exact structure of J.P. Morgan’s acquisition of WaMu’s deposits wasn’t immediately known, except that the New York bank, which has long coveted WaMu as a way to secure a footprint on the West Coast, will assume most of the thrift’s deposits and branches, as well as some other operations.