This is what hypocrisy looks like

Posted on October 16, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

The NY Times recently interviewed legendary college football coach and ESPN analyst Lou Holtz on a wide range of topics relating to college football.  Check out this particular exchange from the interview:

NY Times Question: Are there too many [college football] games on television?

Holtz’s Answer: No. If people didn’t watch, they wouldn’t be on TV. Let the market decide.

Follow-up Question: Should ESPN, and not the colleges, be paying football players with the enormous profit from televising their games?

Holtz’s Answer: Absolutely not. Our contracts are with the conferences or schools, not the athletes. One percent go on to play in the N.F.L. They are students who play athletics. They want to be paid, go work for Walmart. I don’t have time to tell you how strongly I feel about this.

There is something horribly hypocritical and logically contradictory in Lou Holtz’s answers to both questions.  After all, if “the market” should determine the optimal number of football games on television, then why shouldn’t player salaries at the college level also be set by market forces and not by arbitrary and self-serving NCAA rules?

Check out the full interview here.

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“Gödel’s Loophole”

Posted on October 15, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

That is the title of this paper which revisits the legendary story of Kurt Gödel‘s purported discovery of a deep logical flaw in the US Constitution on the eve of his citizenship examination in December 1947. But what was this flaw?  No one really knows for sure, since there is no written record of Gödel’s lost discovery. The paper “Gödel’s Loophole,” however, is worth reading because it revisits this enigmatic episode in Gödel’s life and poses a simple question, why is there is no record of and so little academic curiosity regarding the details of Gödel’s purported finding, especially considering his intellectual stature and extraordinary genius?

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What is the optimal length of a blog post?

Posted on October 13, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

We can all agree that, ideally, blogs should be engaging and entertaining and even educational, but how long should a blog post be?

On one extreme, we have the Twitter model in which “tweets” must be 140 characters or less (characters, not words!). On the other extreme, we have the academic “law review” approach in which the average length of papers in the top law journals easily exceeds 10,000 words or more. There is clearly a wide margin between these two extremes, so wide that it is hard to say what the optimal length of a blog post should be. Perhaps, however, we are asking the wrong question. Maybe we should be asking instead, What is the optimal or equilibrium number of blog posts per day?

Some blogs, like 3QuarksDaily, Marginal Revolution, and the Volokh Conspiracy, three of our favorite blogs by the way, tend to post a slew of interesting items and tidbits many times per day. Is this “too warm”? From a blogger’s perspective, one problem with multiple posts per day is that it’s got to be hard even for one’s most loyal and devoted readers to keep up with such a hectic pace of posts.

Other blogs, by contrast, like Ashok Rao and Robin Hanson’s excellent blogs, This is Ashok and Overcoming Bias, seem to post only once every few days or sporadically. Is this approach “too cold”? Here, again from a blogger’s perspective, the risk is that one’s readers might lose interest in your blog if they are not fed a steady diet of daily posts.

Still other blogs, like Cheap Talk, Crooked Timber, and prior probability, appear to have settled on a once per weekday equilibrium. Is this “just right”? How about once per week, like the Becker-Posner blog?

What do you think?

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Should the US military offer immunity to members of terrorist groups?

Posted on October 12, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Why not?  It’s been done before.

Specifically, the US military eventually used this approach in response to the gruesome massacre of civilians in Lawrence, Kansas on 21 August 1863, the largest mass murder of unarmed American civilians on US soil prior to the attacks of 11 September 2001. This massacre–and many other murders and robberies–were carried out by irregular insurgents known as “bushwhackers” during and after the Civil War. Missouri in particular was plagued by bushwhackers, who continued to kill and rob innocents even after the close of the Civil War. But as James P. Muehlberger notes on page 47 of his recent book The Lost Cause: The Trials of Frank and Jesse James, Union General Grenville Dodge decided to respond to this pro-Rebel insurgency by offering full amnesty under military law for the bushwhackers if they would agree to lay down their arms, an offer that was promptly accepted by many of the former rebels.

So, prior probability wonders out loud why the US military doesn’t try this soft approach in the “war on terror”. Instead of commando raids or drone strikes, let’s offer known terrorists full legal immunity from prosecution in exchange for giving up violence …

What do you think?

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Internet Population Map (circa 2006)

Posted on October 11, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Via the science journal Nature, this is what a political map of the world would look like if the size of each country were correlated with the size of its online population. Here is a more recent internet population map.

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Review of “David and Goliath”

Posted on October 10, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

A lot of envious academics and various haters (here is one egregious example) have been critical of Malcolm Gladwell’s lastest work David and Goliath.  prior probability, however, loved it. Here’s why:

1. First and foremost, Gladwell is a great writer. True, his stories are purely anecdotal, but they are compelling and fun to read.

2. Also, Gladwell is willing to admit his mistakes. He concedes, for example, on pages 286-287 of his latest book that his previous progressive views on affirmative action were wrong. (Interestingly, however, his admission of error is buried deep in a footnote at the back of his book.)

3. His conclusions are often provocative and counter-intuitive but always well-reasoned, such as his point that too much criminal punishment can actually lead to an increase in the rate of crime!

But despite these positives, there is one big hole in Gladwell’s book–a major internal contradiction. On the one hand, Gladwell argues that too much criminal punishment (such as California’s Three Strikes Law) is bad because many criminals are also fathers. Gladwell’s argument, in essence, is that hard time deprives children of their fathers, and these fatherless children themselves then become criminals.

But on the other hand, Gladwell also claims that many great men (like doctor Jay Freireich, whose medical research has saved countless lives) have made great contributions to society precisely because they didn’t have a father. Gladwell’s logic here is that, in some cases, the deprivation of not having the love and affection of a father creates a level of “desirable difficulty” that can cause some fatherless children to strive more and work harder.

So, why don’t these two effects of “bad” and “good” kinds of deprivation just cancel each other out? Alas, Gladwell never gives us a straight answer.

Does this mean we can expect a “sequel” to David and Goliath?

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Should Puerto Rico default on its sovereign debts?

Posted on October 9, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

You may have heard about the Eurozone crisis (see also cartoon below) and the City of Detroit’s well-publicized decision to declare bankruptcy, but did you know about Puerto Rico’s debt crisis. If not, check out this in-depth report published in yesterday’s New York Times. Here is an excerpt:

Puerto Rico, with 3.7 million residents, has about $87 billion of debt, counting pensions, or $23,000 for every man woman and child. That compares with about $18 billion of debt for Detroit, with a little more than 700,000 people, or about $25,000 for every person in the city. * * * Detroit, at least, was able to seek relief in bankruptcy court, but Puerto Rico is in a legal twilight zone. Territories, like states, have no ability to declare bankruptcy. Another territory, the Northern Mariana Islands, tried in 2012, but its case was rejected.

Although the bankruptcy code does not apply to a sovereign state or territory, why shouldn’t Puerto Rico opt for a “strategic default” on its sovereign debt to force Congress to deal with this mess? The answer appears towards the end of the NY Times report:

The three main ratings agencies [i.e. Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch] have held Puerto Rico’s general-obligation debt one notch above junk, despite the deterioration of the last few weeks. * * * A one-notch downgrade would officially send Puerto Rico’s general debt into junk territory, with troubling consequences. Puerto Rico, like Detroit and numerous other localities, is party to financial contracts known as interest-rate swaps, which require it to post cash collateral if its credit falls below investment grade. In addition, mutual funds and other institutions might have to sell their Puerto Rican holdings if they lose their investment-grade ratings. That could set off another damaging run.

One last point. Notice that Puerto Rico’s political status in no way affects Puerto Rico’s looming debt crisis. The problem would essentially be the same even if Puerto Rico were a US State or an independent republic. Maybe Puerto Rico should opt to become a county of the State of Florida. That way, it could follow Detroit’s approach and simply declare bankruptcy.

http://www.fxtimes.com

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Why are there no Nobel prizes in law or business?

Posted on October 8, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

The short answer is Alfred Nobel’s will.  When Mr Nobel established the Nobel prizes in his will (back in 1895), he created prizes for the natural sciences–Physical Science, Chemistry, and Medical Science or Physiology–, another prize for Literature, as well as a fifth and final prize for contributions to World Peace. (Since 1968, Sweden’s Central Bank has also funded a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.) But, arguably, risk-taking entrepreneurs (like Bill Gates or the founders of Google) and men and women committed to the rule of law (like the judges and prosecutors in Italy who risked their lives to fight the Mafia or overworked public defenders who defend our legal rights on a daily basis) have also made great and lasting contributions to humanity. So why are there no Nobel prizes in law or business? After all, Alfred Nobel himself was a successful businessman!

One possible reason is that successful lawyers and entrepreneurs don’t really need another prize (beyond the monetary and non-pecuniary rewards offered by their chosen professions), but couldn’t the same be said about scientists, especially in the fields of Medical Science or Chemistry?

Another reason (a more snooty reason, to be sure) is that fields like law and business are just professions or “trades” (like dentistry) and don’t really produce any new contributions to knowledge. But what about the peace prize or the prize for literature?

Yet another reason might relate to the problem of subjectivity and measurement. How would contributions to law or business be measured? Any set of criteria promises to be purely subjective and thus arbitrary. But again, couldn’t the same be said of the peace prize?

What do you think?

Bonus Link: The Nobel Prize Is Really Annoying
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Are the recent US commando raids in Libya and Somalia legal?

Posted on October 7, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

The news media are reporting two military raids–one in Libya, the other in Somalia–led by US commandos (with support from the FBI and the CIA) over this past weekend. Do these military raids violate international law? More to the point, does the President have the authority under the US Constitution to conduct such military operations overseas?

In the Prize Cases, decided in 1863, a majority of the justices of the US Supreme Court upheld President Lincoln’s executive order of April 1861 to blockade Southern ports and confiscate domestic and foreign vessels and cargoes without compensation (in response to South Carolina’s attack on Fort Sumter). Five justices concluded that Lincoln’s actions were within his textual Article II Commander-in-Chief power. Four justices, however, dissented from this decision on the grounds that a naval blockade is an act of war and thus must be authorized by Congress. So, are the raids in Libya and Somalia within the President’s Commander-in-Chief power, or are they acts of war requiring legislative authorization?

Image from FBI website shows Anas al-Libi

This image from the FBI website shows Anas al-Libi, who was captured by US forces this weekend in Tripoli. Bonus Link: Robert Chesney’s thoughts

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“The Story of the Water Droplets”

Posted on October 6, 2013 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

prior probability is reblogging our “Story of the Water Droplets,” a short personal memoir which won an honorable mention from The Writer Site, an award-winning blog whose main mission is to help writers write. Our short story is less than 400 words, but it describes our sense of wonderment and our approach to knowledge.

Luanne's avatarLuanne Castle: Poetry and Other Words (and cats!)

The Story of the Water Droplets

by Enrique Guerra-Pujol

Whenever my wife and I return to Jamaica to visit our family and friends, we like to begin our day by waking up early to see the sunrise and walking on the beach. As the soft sun appears above the horizon, I will wade into the warm tropical waters and perform a peculiar and private ritual. In brief, I lunge into the gentle waves, clasp together the palms of my hands, and splash the ocean waters as high as I possibly can.

This motion produces hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of tiny water droplets, flying every which way. Each airborne droplet sparkles under the rising Caribbean sun, yet the duration of this chaotic ballet of droplets is but short- lived. This transitory constellation of water droplets falls back into ocean in the blink of an eye.

I confess that I never tired…

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