prior probability

Why hasn’t the Russian Federation been expelled from the United Nations yet? For further information about this question, see here and here.

Update: Hey, at least FIFA has banned the Russian national team from this year’s World Cup!

Bye bye, February! In honor of the shortest month of the year, below is a brief listing of my most succinct scholarly works:

1. Kant on Evidence: A Hypothetical Reply to Kerr, a three-paragraph comment letter published in the summer 2019 issue of my favorite law review, The Green Bag.
2. Research Fraud as Tort, a comment letter published in the Sept. 25, 2015 issue of the journal Science (also three paragraphs).
3. Public Trust Doctrine: Too Broad, a comment letter published in the Oct. 2, 2009 issue of Science (only two paragraphs!).

My all-time shortest contribution, however, is this one-paragraph comment letter that was published in the July 5, 2013 issue of journal Science. PS: Here is a non-gated version (see letter #4).

Although I hate to be “that guy” — and I am rooting for the Ukrainians to repel their Russian invaders — few people “north of the border” like to be reminded of the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), which was an illegal and unjustified war of aggression initiated by the USA, but the Southwest region of North America, including all of Texas and California, once belonged to Mexico (hat tip: u/Homesanto).

Putin is not the only world leader who has ordered an unjustified “special military operation” in violation of international law. The late Bush Senior ordered an old school military invasion of Panama in December 1989 in order to depose General Manuel Noriega, while his war criminal son, Little Bush (Bushito), began a costly and unjustified war in Iraq in March of 2003 under false pretenses.

(Point of order: I don’t mean to defend Putin with this post. The invasion of Ukraine is an illegal and unjustified war of aggression by any measure, much like the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the Mexican-American War of 1848. My purpose here is to condemn the USA, especially the knavish and ignoble patriarchs of the Bush family.)

Did you know the tallest standing wooden structure in Europe is the Gliwice Radio Tower (118 metres or 387 feet) and that this historic radio tower was the scene of the Gleiwitz incident on 31 August 1939? You can read about this famous “false flag” operation here, via Wikipedia, or better yet, you can watch the 1961 East German film Der Fall Gleiwitz (see below) or the 1979 Polish made-for-TV movie Operacja Himmler, both of which tell the story of the dramatic events leading up to this incident and to Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939.

Check out this beautiful essay by Jake Rossen, which is titled “The Enduring Mystery of the Oreo Cookie Design” (hat tip: @pickover).

Hello, fellow Earthlings! I now want to conclude my multi-part series on the problem of misinformation (see here, here, here, and here) by posing a simple rhetorical question: What’s so bad about misinformation and conspiracy theories and the like? After all, misinformation is an age-old problem; conspiracy theories have always existed, even in colonial times (see here, for example).

In fact, the irony of this entire series on the problem of misinformation is that, as my colleague and friend Matthew Yglesias has recently explained (see here), people are probably better informed now about most matters than in any other time in history. So even if Pozen, Benkler, Kapczynsky, and others are correct to believe that the Internet has made it easier for people to spread baseless conspiracy theories and other forms of fake news, at the same time the Internet has also made it easier to discover the relevant facts about any particular controversy. At worst, both of these information effects just cancel each other out.

More importantly, as I never get tired of repeating, the optimal level of misinformation in a free society is not zero. If some people want to believe that Big Pharma created the pandemic to boost profits or that Donald Trump is a Russian agent or that UFOs are real (oops!), they should not only be free to hold these beliefs; they should also be free to spread their beliefs and persuade others they are right, no matter how zany or wrong their beliefs are. At a minimum, living in a free society means that we must tolerate some level of stupidity and ignorance from our fellow citizens and neighbors. To conclude, misinformation is the price we pay for living in a free society, a sign that we are living in a vibrant and healthy democracy, not a sick or decaying one.