prior probability

Also, check out this thread on Twitter.

Jerry Coyne ponders this question here. For my part, I am not persuaded by Coyne’s utilitarian defense of Gates (i.e. the fact that Gates has “donated” a lot of his wealth to charity) for two reasons. First, Coyne does not discuss the monopolistic source of Gates’s riches, and secondly, even if Gates were deserving of his incredible wealth, all he has done is “donate” those monies to himself via his own charity (the Gates Foundation). What’s so generous about such a self-serving tax write-off?

Did you know that a century ago eight players from the Chicago White Sox baseball club conspired with professional gamblers to rig the outcome of the 1919 World Series. Here is a recent op-ed (NYT) by John Thorn, a historian of Major League Baseball, about this incident, and here are two Wikipedia entries: “1919 World Series” and “Black Sox Scandal.”

Alas, according to this report (hat tip: @kottke), this infamous bridge in North Carolina was recently raised an extra eight inches (to 12′ 4″).

Continuing with my survey of illicit promises, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan and David A. Hoffman’s recent critique of hush contracts deserves mention. (Wilkinson-Ryan and Hoffman, law professors at the University of Pennsylvania, published their powerful critique in The Atlantic.) Their Ivory Tower critique, however, is highly selective and downright dangerous: selective because it focuses only on a small subset of nondisclosure agreements, such as those involving prominent media men like Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer; dangerous because Wilkinson-Ryan and Hoffman want State legislatures to criminalize the use of hush contracts by business firms. Or in their own words: Continue reading →

Thus far, we have surveyed three types of agreements or exchanges: illegal & immoral ones; legal & immoral ones; and illegal & moral ones. This leaves one last category–agreements that are both legal and moral. By definition, such exchanges are not illicit, since they raise neither legal nor moral issues; nevertheless, I include this fourth category for completeness. Don’t most confidentiality agreements or “hush contracts” fall into this category? To see why, I shall present a modified version of the famous “Prisoners’ Dilemma” to illustrate this category. Continue reading →

Let’s continue with our survey of illicit promises. Thus far, we have seen examples of legal but immoral agreements (such as slave trade contracts under Imperial Spain’s asiento system) as well as of illegal but moral agreements (such as usurious payday loans). Here, let’s focus on agreements that are illegal and immoral. Consider, by way of example, the actress Felicity Huffman, who pled guilty in federal court to one count of “conspiracy to commit mail fraud” for paying a college admissions consultant $15,000 to have a proctor correct her daughter’s answers on the December 2017 SAT entrance examination. (The relevant facts are alleged here.) In other words, Huffman entered into an illicit agreement, one that was not only illegal under federal law (mail fraud) but also immoral, since her daughter received an unfair advantage over other test takers. By the way, why wasn’t her husband charged, and why isn’t the public allowed to see Ms. Huffman’s mugshot? Why do the wealthy get so many special privileges not afforded to run-of-the-mill criminal suspects?

And she served only 11 days of her sentence.