The McGurk Effect

Found on Carpe Diem:

Barack Obama and affirmative action

I recently stumbled on this quotation in a letter that Barack Obama wrote when he was at Harvard:

I must say, however, that as someone who has undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career, and as someone who may have benefited from the Law Review's affirmative action policy when I was selected to join the Review last year, I have not personally felt stigmatized either within the broader law school community or as a staff member of the Review.

Three things jumped out at me.

1) Opponents of affirmative action see three possible harms from affirmative action. The most obviously harmed are those who would otherwise get positions that go to the affirmative-action candidates. These people are usually white or Asian. Second are those minority members who could attain the positions without affirmative action. They are the ones that may suffer from being stigmatized. Third are those who get positions from affirmative action but are not really qualified. They are usually helped but can be harmed if they are put into situations in which they are not competitive; the claim is that they might prosper and do better in the long run in a less competitive situation. Since Obama has identified himself as being in the third group, he should not be claiming that he was immune from the harm that is posited to those in the second group.

2) This admission undercuts the often-heard argument that Obama's Ivy League credentials and his position at the Law Review are proof of superior intellect.

3) Obama may be the greatest success story of affirmative action because without affirmative action Obama would not have had the Ivy League credentials that were essential for his election as president.  If Obama is an excellent president, then his presidency validates of the wisdom of affirmative action. I have not seen this argument made proponents of affirmative action, perhaps because of point two above.

Will fiscal policy return to hibernation?

Sometimes the only way to diminish an idea is the try it, to see what happens when it is implemented. Keynesianism was largely irrelevant from the 1970s until George W Bush revived it in his administration, and the Obama administration is crowded with Keynesians. But is this revival supported by the evidence? Michael Boskin said "No" in the Wall Street Journal more than a week ago:

These empirical studies leave many leading economists dubious about the ability of government spending to boost the economy in the short run. Worse, the large long-term costs of debt-financed spending are ignored in most studies of short-run fiscal stimulus and even more so in the political debate.

Only time will tell if we will see Keynesianism again recede. 

One attraction of Keynesian policy is that it lets the government do something and people want the government to do something when there is a problem. There is, however, an asymmetry in how the results are judged. The Obama economists projected a path for unemployment with and without the stimulus program that Congress enacted shortly after Obama became president. Unemployment did not follow the projected path; on the contrary, it has greatly exceeded the path predicted if there were no stimulus. The Keynesians have not acknowledged that this is evidence that their program did not work. Rather they argue it shows that the program was not big enough. They are taken seriously in this response. However, consider what things would look like if the stimulus had not been enacted and unemployment had taken the course that it has taken. Would anyone take seriously the response that the initial shock was bigger than we had realized? Everyone would have concluded that we made a mistake in not passing a stimulus.

There is an incentive for politicians to "do something" in the way the media and the public react to failure. They are more willing to forgive failure or explain it away when the government acts than when the government does not act.

Climategate

Blogs are abuzz with the story of Climategate. James Taranto gives us the bottom line:

The press's view on global warming rests on an appeal to authority: the consensus among scientists that it is real, dangerous and man-caused. But the authority of scientists rests on the integrity of the scientific process, and a "consensus" based on the suppression of alternative hypotheses is, quite simply, a fraudulent one.

Update: Now the issue is on youtube. A few years ago the gatekeepers of the main stream media could have shut down this whole discussion. The Internet has democratized the flow of information.

A wonderful example of cognitive dissonance

Here, in the comments. I wonder how long it will be there before it goes down the memory hole.

More visual illusions

Carpe Diem has another batch of visual illusions.

Self selection

An interesting look at self selection and group think from a Psychology Today blog

Birthers and Truthers

From David Kuhn at Real Clear Politics:

Fully 35 percent of Democrats believe George W. Bush had advance knowledge of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Fully 28 percent of Republicans believe Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States.

Meet the fanatical third.

....
A few years ago, an Emory psychologist scanned the brains of self-described partisans. Partisans were able to notice the hypocritical statements of the opposing candidate but not the inconsistencies of their preferred candidate.

Global Warming

From Commentary's Contentions on faith and global warming:

For my part, it reminds me of a paper I once graded at Yale. The student author was absolutely persuaded that carbon monoxide caused global warming.

When I pointed out that CO was indeed toxic, but that no one called it a greenhouse gas, and that it was not the same as CO2, the student had no idea what I was talking about (and refused to revise the draft). All evidence had become irrelevant: what mattered was asserting his ill-informed belief, and refusing to reconsider on the grounds that doing so would be akin to apostasy. In a student, that is sad; in the making of policy, it’s both expensive and foolish.

See the comments, and also this at the American Spectator Blog.

color illusion

An awesome optical illusion.

Stigma beats dogma

Over at phibetacons.nationalreview.com, a post on stigma beats dogma:

In the battle of ideas, stigma always beats dogma. In other words, through stigmatization, one can defeat a set of ideas or principles without ever "winning" an argument on the merits.

Isn't this what political correctness is all about?

Falsifiability

This afternoon I stumbled on a set of speakers on CSPAN discussing the future of progressivism (though under the title of the future of conservatism). What struck me was the their position was non-falsifiable. They had great faith in the ability of government to serve the people provided that the right people control government. The right people are the progressives and the wrong people are the conservatives. The present triumph of progressives opens up the possibility of a long reign of progressive rule that can only be stopped by mistakes of the progressives. Hence, if the policies of the Obama administration are disastrous resulting in electoral reversal, it will not be that the progressive policies were flawed. It will be that the people who implemented them were not good enough. True progressives will continue to advocate these policies, arguing that they will work next time provided that better people are carrying them out.

Everyone holds beliefs that are non-falsifiable. However, we should be able to recognize that that these beliefs are not scientific, but rather non-scientific and religious. It does strike me as a bit strange that the progressives seek to discredit conservative policies on empirical grounds (i.e., the present recession shows the failure of laissez-faire policies), but are unwilling to submit, a priori, their policies to similar empirical tests.

Preference falsification

A post on the Ace of Spades blog led to this article, about this book. The book looks intriguing.

The biggest threat

Greg Mankiw links to a Gallup poll reporting on what people believe is the biggest threat to the U.S. In 2006 55% of Democrats said that big government was, but in 2009 only 32% said the same. In contrast, in 2006 68% of Republicans said that big government was the biggest threat, while in 2009 it had risen to 80%. Independents did not show much change, with their numbers on big government as a threat dropping from 60% to 59%.

Is this an example of partisanship bias?

Update: Does this argue partisanship bias on the part of the press?

Partisanship bias

Marginalrevolution.com reports on a post at fivethirtyeight.com about partisanship bias, the tendency for those with a strong partisan identification to see reality in a way that fits their ideological preconceptions.

A good example comes from the research of Larry Bartels. He analyzed a 1988 survey that asked “Would you say that compared to 1980, inflation has gotten better, stayed about the same, or gotten worse?” Amazingly, over half of the self-identified strong Democrats in the survey said that inflation had gotten worse and only 8% thought it had gotten much better, even though the actual inflation rate dropped from 13% to 4% during Reagan’s eight years in office. Republicans were similarly biased about the Clinton-era economy: in 1996, a majority of Republicans thought that the budget deficit had increased.

In a totally different thread, hotair takes a look at the widespread but false "plastic turkey" story that circulated widely about George Bush, and is still believed by many on the far left. However, in turn hotair may have started its own version of a story that follows a script that they want the story to follow.

Confirmation Bias

Michael Shermer uses this anniversary of the Jonestown massacre to write about confirmation bias:

[Confirmation bias] is when we look for and find evidence to support what we already believe, and ignore or rationalize away evidence that does not. And because we are so tribal by nature, we employ confirmation bias with extra vigor when it comes to defending the groups we belong to.

Research on confirmation bias has found that when subjects are presented with evidence that contradicts their deeply held beliefs, they dismiss it as invalid, while other subjects treat the same information as valuable when it confirms what they believe.

I have written several posts that highlight confirmation bias, though with different names. See here and here. It is something we all suffer from and that we probably cannot overcome, but acknowledging it may lessen the problem.

We do not tolerate the intolerable

A few days ago I saw a story about a lawsuit at a nearby college (Depauw University) that had the quotation, "We cannot tolerate the intolerable." The thought struck me that what we tolerate is always limited, that everyone draws a line somewhere and will not tolerate things beyond that line. The interesting question is, "Where does one draw the line?"

The politically-correct folks like to think of themselves as tolerant and others as intolerant. That thought is an illusion that blinds them to their own intolerance. For many of them, any idea that can be labeled as racist, sexist, or homophobic becomes intolerable and no longer has to be taken seriously. Milton Friedman was one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century, but many on the left have decided they can ignore him because he once talked to Pinochet who they have decreed is intolerable, and hence Friedman is intolerable.

It is best to realize that we are all intolerant of some things. Often those who think they are the most tolerant are in fact the least tolerant.