Monthly Archives: April 2013

Random Thoughts Post-Boston

Random observations, in no particular order…

Anyone can buy a pressure cooker, but the Boston bombers also killed with guns. Wonder where they got them? Internet? Gun show? As a friend of mine has noted, we demand background checks to buy Sudafed, but not guns.

The right to vote is at least as important as the right to own a firearm, but the same people who are so protective of the Constitution and the  2d Amendment seem to have no problem requiring documentation in order to vote. Yet in-person vote fraud is virtually non-existent, while gun violence perpetrated by felons and paranoids is epidemic.

Speaking of self-appointed guardians of (selective) constitutional rights, it hasn’t taken long for many of them (yes, Lindsey Graham, I’m looking at YOU) to advocate immediate retribution against the Boston bombers in defiance of both the Constitution and the rule of law. Amazing how quickly the same people who indignantly wrap themselves in the Constitution when they perceive a threat to their rights are willing to resort to mob rule when someone else’s rights are at issue.

Finally, for all you War on Terror types: the horrific attack at the Boston Marathon was treated as a crime, and the perpetrators were promptly apprehended. Random acts of carnage, whatever the motives of those responsible, are criminal acts. The perpetrators are criminals, not “warriors.”

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Choosing our Authorities

I was going to blog about the Reinhart-Rogoff thesis this morning, but Paul Krugman not only beat me to it, he (unsurprisingly) said it better.

What–you aren’t familiar with Reinhart-Rogoff? The term is shorthand for a paper circulated by two Harvard economists, Reinhart and Rogoff, in 2010. (It evidently wasn’t even a peer reviewed article–just a working paper.) The paper purported “to identify a critical “threshold,” a tipping point, for government indebtedness. Once debt exceeds 90 percent of gross domestic product, they claimed, economic growth drops off sharply.”

The paper was immediately seized on by proponents of austerity, despite the fact that other economists criticized the methodology, and still others tried but couldn’t replicate the findings. It became the basis of policy decisions throughout Europe. It was a justification for Paul Ryan’s budget. And then, when the authors finally shared their calculations, it turned out that a coding error–in lay language, a mistake in their use of the Excel computer program–invalidated their results.

There is a moral to this story, and it has nothing to do with economics, or the importance of peer review, or the tendency of a Harvard pedigree to lend unearned credibility to a scholarly product. This fiasco is another example of a growing phenomenon: ideologically-driven choices of reality. In today’s America, too many of us read everything selectively; we comb the news for evidence that supports our pre-existing beliefs. We read the bible and the Constitution selectively, conveniently ignoring the parts that conflict with our worldviews. We dismiss evidence that confuses us. Ambiguity and complexity become enemies.

The problem is, the clarity we achieve with our chosen authorities often conflicts with messy, ambiguous reality. And that makes matters worse.

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This is a Test

Whatever your position on the watered-down background check measure that failed yesterday for lack of a super-majority, you should be appalled by the ability of a  minority to block action desired by an overwhelming majority of the American public, and a clear majority of their representatives.

If this were an isolated case, we could shrug it off, attribute it to the messiness that is the democratic process. But yesterday was simply another episode in the soap opera called Your Broken Government. The story line is familiar: the Party of No refuses to engage in anything resembling good-faith negotiation or legislative compromise, the Party of Wimps shakes its head and throws up its hands–and nothing happens. Problems aren’t solved. Jobs aren’t created. Petty politics replaces lawmaking. Statesmanship is a word in the dictionary.

This soap opera features a dysfunctional family, where the GOP is the bratty child who has tantrums and refuses to do his chores and the Democrats are the enabling parent who substitutes ineffectual remonstrances for real discipline.

Actually, television offers an even better analogy. In the original Star Trek series, the Enterprise came across a planet where warfare was conducted entirely by computer; rather than use weapons that would devastate cities, the computer would simulate battles and send messages to the losers–who would then obediently report to death chambers. In the United States Senate, a group of Senators sends Harry Reid a message, telling him of its intent to filibuster, and suddenly, sixty votes are required rather than a simple majority. No real war–not even a requirement that the objecting minority actually stand and talk. Just servile acquiescence.

Yesterday, those elected to represent us spit in the faces of the ninety percent of Americans who wanted background checks. Representative democracy did not work. Again.

The question is, what will the American public do about our broken government?

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Garbage In, Garbage Out

At one time or another, those of us who teach despair of the whole educational enterprise. We entertain the dark suspicion that some people simply can’t make use of information–that their ability to reason is faulty, that they are unable to consider and evaluate evidence to reach sound conclusions.

Happily, I’m wrong.  At least, that’s the conclusion reached by researchers at Princeton,  When a wrong choice is made, the researchers found that it might be the information rather than the brain’s decision-making process that is to blame.

The results of the study were reported in Science Daily, and the experiment involved very simple types of information; nevertheless, if the conclusions are replicated, the importance of good education and accurate journalism increases.

If human decision-making depends upon the quality of the information available, those of us in the information-providing business have an ethical obligation to provide information that is sound and verified. In public school classrooms, that means teaching science in science class,not religion. It means teaching American and constitutional history in much more depth. It means introducing students to the world beyond America’s borders–the world they will increasingly interact with, and about which they will need solid information.

As important as education is, the information we are fed daily is even more consequential. In a country that celebrates free expression, we can’t mandate truth in journalism–and even a cursory trip around the internet will demonstrate how much  unreliable and delusional “information” is out there. In the age of the internet, it’s increasingly difficult to separate fact from opinion and both from outright propaganda. When we relied upon daily newspapers and the evening news–the “legacy” media–we missed a lot, but those journalists generally followed an ethical code that required independent verification of information before it was reported. In today’s news environment, with the 24-hour “news hole,” speed often trumps accuracy even for the more responsible media–and there are more and more irresponsible media outlets competing for our attention.

We can’t make good decisions if we don’t have trustworthy information.

The Princeton study validates a couple of old sayings: “it ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.”   And the even pithier, “garbage in, garbage out.”

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Words are Inadequate

We still have no answer to the questions who and why…..no way of getting our heads around the fact that some (presumably) human being or beings planned and executed a devastating, vicious attack on people they didn’t know, people who had come to Boston simply to run a marathon.

This is the horror of terrorism: it’s random. It reminds us all that life is tenuous, and that any belief that we are in control our destinies is illusory.  It reminds us–as if we had any doubt after Sandy Hook and Gabrielle Giffords and 9-11– that there are sick people in this world, people whose rage or pain or zealotry trumps their humanity.

There really aren’t any words for what most of us are feeling right now.

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