Ignorance and Efficiency

I picked up John Rawls' A Theory of Justice last Friday and digested segments through the weekend. This evening I caught up with 3 Quarks Daily and was connected to a Libertarian critique of both Rawls and other Libertarian efforts to appropriate Rawls for their own devices.

Rawls' core principle is that given a "veil of ignorance" about the capacities, needs and external facts surrounding a decision-making event about resources, an individual will choose a fair distribution of resources since they can't be certain how the resources will ultimately be distributed. By being fair, the decision maker will maximize their own chance of a fair outcome.

This is a game theoretic resolution that parallels ideas like tit-for-tat and reciprocal altruism. It is also used to further justify a model of economic interventionism that assigns fair distribution of resources in a society. Hence the concern of Libertarians, though I see David Gordon's roll-up as an incremental and technical fight within the Libertarian community and about which I have little comment.

Instead, I find it interesting that if we acknowledge the implications of limited knowledge we arrive at inherently specialized models for decision making: in this case implications about the fairness of government policies concerning welfare or health care policy. This closely parallels the veil of ignorance expressed in Quine's notion of "gavagai" where we have to accept the limitations of strong notions of meaning and instead rely on decision procedures to achieve a tentative understanding of the immediate epistemological landscape.

One aspect that the purely philosophical treatment of this problem does not address, however, is how to handle the problem of procedural inefficiency. What do I mean by that? Well, we can take the standard critique of command economies as interfering with efficient allocation of goods and services. We can also take the apparent administrative inefficiencies of modern American health delivery. Both reflect differences in economic theories and have strong historical exemplars, but are polar opposites in delivery and informational mechanisms. If these are inefficient models compared to other examples, is there a principle of ignorance that can guide us in how to apportion resources in the face of these failures? For example, let's say that equality of health care is a good because if we could divide-up health care resources evenly and equitably it would result in that equality. Yet, if the mechanism of achieving equality also costs enough that it compromises other aspects of quality, what is the cost/benefit inflection point that recommends one approach versus another? We could seek to maximize some measure of person health outcomes/dollar using a basket of measures like those measured by the Commonwealth Fund's analyses of the United States' problematic health delivery system, but at what point do we agree that government is the best mechanism for delivery?

I tend to think that a principle of ignorance must remain in effect. Given uncertainty about efficiency in allocation, it is best to create a basket of solutions that try to achieve the same outcome. So, given the massive administrative costs of US health care delivery, we can create mandates for integrated billing and informatics for some domains while supporting tax incentives to improve delivery for other domains. There is then competition among outcomes in the basket of solutions and our ignorance is reduced through small, evolutionary outcomes.

Treasures and Syncretism

Needless to say, late summer is a busy time for me. Between consulting gigs, investment pitches, collaboration planning, and reporting to my investors and government agencies, I rarely have time to give the blogosphere the attention that it needs.

Still, while wandering through the National Gallery while on a quick hop into DC, and just coming down from being mesmerized by the Afghanistan collection, I sought out the Rauschenberg at right. RIP, Robert. With hope, the vaults of the nuclear enterprise in your collage are now just cold warrior memories.

The National Museum of Kabul collection was amazing, though, showing how Alexander's conquest came quickly to be reflected in the artistry. A different era, perhaps, where resistance to foreign occupiers was tempered by an acknowledgment that power is more important than fairness or respect for self-determination.

But truly sad was the gigantic gap in the timeline view of Afghan art and culture from the 1200s up through the discovery of graves during the Soviet occupation. That the analysis and remains stayed in Kabul from the Soviet era contrasts sharply with the later destruction of the Buddhist statues at the hands of the Taliban.

Inspiration and The West

Is the western United States uniquely inspirational for science and art? That old hypothesis of mine came back to me last week as I looked down over the Rio Grande river valley from 10,000 feet up on the Sandia Tramway.

The vast stillness of the valley, the faint X of airport runways, the thin green ribbon of the river and its fragile accompaniment of cottonwoods and salt cedar, the layering of atmosphere as the monsoonal cumulonimbus began to darken—all inspirational in the same way that they were when I was growing up in New Mexico.

But how does that translate into a crossover of science and art? My other data points were that Jaron Lanier grew up about a mile from me (I would later get to know his dad, Ellery, when Ellery was working on his doctorate in psychology), and that Alvy Ray Smith was also a southwesterner who, in turn, grew up just across the New Mexico/Texas border from Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics and Netscape fame. Then there is Robert R. Wilson who was a Manhattan Project physicist, sculptor and Fermilab architect. And recently, when visiting Southern New Mexico, I saw paintings by a bio-informatics professor and former member of The Institute for Genetic Research (J. Craig Ventner’s original effort) hanging in the lobby of a grocery store.

The tramway ride, it turned out, was part of a mini vacation within a vacation combined with work for DOD in the previous several days. It was my first time monitoring an experiment being conducted on live test subjects and it was fascinating, although somewhat tedious. Bookending the work phase with beautiful scenery, meals under evening thunderheads, historical markers along the Jornado del Muerto, and a quick flight back to the Bay Area, was invigorating and inspirational.

Royalty and Pronouns

SCOTUS released the groundbreaking 2nd Amendment decision today in DC v. Heller and, as I parse through early analysis of the linguistics and historical semantics of the majority decision, the use of a sub-form of the so-called "royal we" in the discussion of court decisions strikes me:

In United States v. Miller, 307 U. S. 174, 179 (1939), we explained that...

Now this is interesting in that it paints a picture of unity in the way a court operates. A reasonable alternative might have been:

...the majority decision concluded that...

Instead, Scalia is both time traveling and invoking a certain personification of SCOTUS wherein its often bicameral nature is subordinated to the body as a whole. Unity out of many, indeed.

Pathological Science and Odd Birds

Over at Recursivity there was a discussion of a psychic advisor to a school teaching assistant who told her that one of her charges was being abused. The school then undertook an investigation about alleged abuse claims based on the psychic’s suggestion. The child has autistic spectrum disorder and so often exhibits behavior unlike non-autistic children, as well, complicating the whole issue. Communication is limited, also.

So how should we treat fringe science and pseudoscience as a social phenomena? For instance, there is a fairly long history of investigations of supposed psychic phenomena dating back to the late 1800s, but with institutional investigation in the US beginning in the 1920s or so. Since that time, there have been many university laboratories created to try to study anomalous experimental findings. Projects at SRI in the 60s expanded the use of our tax dollars on this topic in pursuit of Cold War weapons.

As per the basic revulsion I felt at the treatment of the poor mother in the Canadian case, there certainly is not any evidence that suggests social policy should be influenced by psychic “discoveries” but there are enough findings that further research may be warranted (though funding that research should be a private—not public—matter). I say this with some trepidation, but I would say the same thing about cold fusion or other anomalous hints at findings.

But then what makes these two cases different from so-called “intelligent design” (ID)? For cold fusion, there is a proposed physical mechanism, for one, so that theory and experiment can progress together. For psi, there are some experimental results that look sufficiently interesting that additional experiments could and have been done. A mechanism is still wanting, however, though some ideas have been proposed based on virtual particle interactions that date to the beginning of the quantum science era.

Both of these are examples of what Irving Langmuir called “pathological science” and both were subject to enormous scrutiny and brought with them substantiated examples of dishonesty on the part of some (but not all) of the participants.

But ID is an odd pathological bird. It doesn’t really propose a physical mechanism but instead claims that there is insufficient evidence for a physical mechanism of evolution (though apparently only at the level of speciation). It also lacks experimental evidence (even in a historical sense) but uses a principle of insufficient information as the core of its methodology. It does share with cold fusion and psi powers the unenviable status of being practiced by at least some dishonest charlatans. In the case of ID, they have been actively trying to insert creationism into school curricula. Interestingly, there has never been a concerted effort by psi or cold fusion advocates to try to insert their ideas into the schools.

The odyssey from pathological to mainstream is not unknown (plate tectonics, for instance) but is only survived by relatively few. My guess is that ID will never make it through that filter and be welcomed to the lands of rationality.

Olympia and Father's Day

It took enormous feats of dadness to get up on Father's Day and make it to the member's early admission to the Frida Kahlo exhibit at SFMOMA today. But we made it and watched the narrative unwind of Latin American socialism, personal tragedy, illness, dysfunctional relationships and catharsis through painting.

Yet slightly more intriguing to me was the use of language and titles in many of the more contemporary works at SFMOMA. Check out Robert Bechtle's irreverent Watsonville Olympia from 1977:



And anyone with a painting or art history degree (or, in my case, a wife with one) will recognize the inside joke (at Manet's expense). Here's Manet's Olympia:

What mountains an artist must climb. Happy Father's Day!

Internets and Guantanamo

It’s no surprise I guess that the US Supreme Court would inevitably embrace the internet as a research tool. In the most recent decision on Guantanamo Bay detentions:

See Halliday & White, The Suspension Clause: English Text, Imperial Contexts, and American Implications, 94 Va. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2008) (hereinafter Halliday & White) (manuscript, at 11, online at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3 /papers.cfm?abstract_id=1008252 (all Internet materials as visited June 9, 2008, and available in Clerk of Court’s case file) (noting that “conceptually the writ arose from a theory of power rather than a theory of liberty”)).

And:

See History of Guantanamo Bay online at https://www.cnic.navy.mil/Guantanamo/AboutGTMO/gtmohistorygeneral/ gtmohistgeneral.

Times change, even at SCOTUS.