June 12, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston
An assault rifle is designed to kill – to kill a lot of people, and quickly. That’s why it was created. That’s its primary function. For soldiers in combat, it’s a very good thing to have. If it could not kill lots of people, nobody would want it.
Manufacturing assault rifles in pink and posting pictures of young girls holding them doesn’t alter that basic purpose. Neither does the statistic that nearly all civilians who own them use them for fun. What that statistic means is that we as a nation have decided through our legislators that the fun of those gun owners is more important than the lives of 50 people in Orlando or 20 schoolchildren in Sandy Hook.
Here’s an analogy. Suppose that the military developed small bomb, something like a hand grenade but much more powerful. It easily blows up a building and kills anything within a 50-yard radius. Soldiers find them to be very effective in combat.
The companies that manufacture these bombs also sell them to the public. Lots of people buy these bombs. Bomb stores spring up next to gun stores. They have names like Bombs Away or It’s Da Bomb – all in good fun. And in fact, nearly all of the buyers use them for fun – tossing them into empty fields. People go to bombing ranges that have small buildings put up so that patrons can blow them sky high. Of course, there are accidents. Bomb owners sometimes blow up themselves. Or their own houses with their children inside.
But occasionally, once a year or so, someone tosses a bomb into a crowd of people or into a real building. Many people are killed. Predictably, liberals say that maybe we ought not allow these bombs to be freely sold. Maybe we ought not let them be sold at all. But the bomb lobby claims that bombs are armaments and therefore are protected by the Constitution from being restricted in any way, and besides, people need the bombs for their own protection. Our legislators, a majority of them, agree. The occasional slaughter is no reason to prevent everyone from getting a bomb.
The bomb lobby and the media will invariably refer to each slaughter as a “tragedy” – unfortunate but unavoidable. After all, the bomber got his bombs legally. And if he did get them illegally, it just shows that bomb laws don’t work.
Punishment Isn’t About Crime
June 10, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston
Robin Hanson has a list of statements (here) that summarize his contrarian view. These include, among many others
The furor over the sentence given to the Stanford swimmer-rapist Brock Turner shows that we should add one more to the list.
Criminologists have spent a lot of time trying to figure out the effect of punishment on crime. Does the death penalty reduce murder rates, and if so by how much? Or more generally, do harsher punishments reduce the crimes they apply to? Does rehabilitation work – or more specifically, which kinds of programs work best? Does taking criminals off the streets reduce overall amounts of crime?
These functions of punishment go under the names of general deterrence, specific deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation. They raise researchable cause-effect questions.
Not so what is probably the most important function of punishment – justice. In crim textbooks (including mine) it goes under the heading of “retribution” or “just deserts.” But basically it’s vengeance. And unlike the other rationales, it is concerned with punishment’s effects not on the behavior criminals but on the feelings of good and righteous citizens. The idea of retribution is that we want punishment for bad guys because it makes us feel better to see them suffer. If the bad person does not suffer enough, the good people feel dissatisfied, even angry, and they call for harsher punishment.
Usually, they cloak this impulse under the more rational principles like deterrence, but let’s be real. Do any of the people insisting that Brock Turner be given a longer sentence think that if he is released after only a few months he will commit more rapes? Or that the short sentence will encourage other fratboys to commit rape, as though horny, drunken 20-year old will pause to think, “Hey, it’ll only be 6 months in the slammer. Now if it were a few years . . . .” ?
Often, this deterrence idea marches under the banner of “sending a message.” A harsh sentence “sends the message” that this behavior will not be tolerated. The cliche slap-on-the-wrist sentence sends the opposite message. But if the intended targets of these messages, potential criminals, rarely receive the messages. That’s especially true for those whose crimes are unplanned and opportunistic. Instead, the people who respond to the message are the same people who wanted it sent. And they respond according to whether the message satisfies their desire for vengeance, or as they would call it, justice.
Some social scientists argue that this desire is part of human nature and that evolution has embedded it in our genes. Even babies, some experiments show, get upset when evildoing (usually by puppets) goes unpunished. But even if the desire is universal, the punishments that arise from it vary widely. In some countries, the six-month sentence would be within the normal range. That is, it would satisfy the desire for justice. In other places, anything less than death would be too lenient.
When vengeance as the basis for policy outweighs the more rational factors like deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation, you get juggernauts like the war on drugs, which was mostly vengeance under a veneer of deterrence. In the initial response to the perceived drug problem, politicians enacted harsher sentences to send a message to drug users and dealers. When these new laws failed to bring the promised reduction in crime, lawmakers might have paused to rethink their assumptions. Instead, they fell all over themselves proposing even harsher sentences, locking up more people for longer periods of time.
Doing more of the same thing and expecting a different result might be a definition of insanity. But in the war on drugs, it functioned like an addiction – addiction to punishment. When a mild amount didn’t have the desired effect, lawmakers (with public approval) raised the dose. We then became habituated to that new level, we thought that only an even higher dose would bring relief. We were punishment junkies, spending more and more of our money on something that brought little relief, all the while raising our level of tolerance. We wound up with “normal” sentences that people in many other Western countries considered medieval.
In the swimmer-rapist case, the people outraged by the six-month sentence are not campaigning for generally harsher sentences for rape. They are, however, demanding the equivalent of a policy change – replacing the judge. But the motive is the same – justice (or vengeance). If we can’t punish the rapist, then let’s try to punish the judge and replace him with someone who gives out sentences that make us feel better. Of course, only the self-delusional will think that punishing the rapist or the judge will have any effect on fratboy date-rape.
One final note: I am not saying that those who want a longer sentence for Turner are wrong. I’m not saying they’re right. What I am saying is that whoever enters that argument on either side should be clear as to the bases of their position. They should also recognize that the issue is one of morals or values, so unlike questions of deterrence, it cannot be resolved with facts.
Posted by Jay Livingston
Robin Hanson has a list of statements (here) that summarize his contrarian view. These include, among many others
| Charity isn’t about Helping Church isn’t about God Medicine isn’t about Health Consulting isn’t about Advice School isn’t about Learning |
The furor over the sentence given to the Stanford swimmer-rapist Brock Turner shows that we should add one more to the list.
| Punishment isn’t about crime. |
Criminologists have spent a lot of time trying to figure out the effect of punishment on crime. Does the death penalty reduce murder rates, and if so by how much? Or more generally, do harsher punishments reduce the crimes they apply to? Does rehabilitation work – or more specifically, which kinds of programs work best? Does taking criminals off the streets reduce overall amounts of crime?
These functions of punishment go under the names of general deterrence, specific deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation. They raise researchable cause-effect questions.
Not so what is probably the most important function of punishment – justice. In crim textbooks (including mine) it goes under the heading of “retribution” or “just deserts.” But basically it’s vengeance. And unlike the other rationales, it is concerned with punishment’s effects not on the behavior criminals but on the feelings of good and righteous citizens. The idea of retribution is that we want punishment for bad guys because it makes us feel better to see them suffer. If the bad person does not suffer enough, the good people feel dissatisfied, even angry, and they call for harsher punishment.
Usually, they cloak this impulse under the more rational principles like deterrence, but let’s be real. Do any of the people insisting that Brock Turner be given a longer sentence think that if he is released after only a few months he will commit more rapes? Or that the short sentence will encourage other fratboys to commit rape, as though horny, drunken 20-year old will pause to think, “Hey, it’ll only be 6 months in the slammer. Now if it were a few years . . . .” ?
Often, this deterrence idea marches under the banner of “sending a message.” A harsh sentence “sends the message” that this behavior will not be tolerated. The cliche slap-on-the-wrist sentence sends the opposite message. But if the intended targets of these messages, potential criminals, rarely receive the messages. That’s especially true for those whose crimes are unplanned and opportunistic. Instead, the people who respond to the message are the same people who wanted it sent. And they respond according to whether the message satisfies their desire for vengeance, or as they would call it, justice.
Some social scientists argue that this desire is part of human nature and that evolution has embedded it in our genes. Even babies, some experiments show, get upset when evildoing (usually by puppets) goes unpunished. But even if the desire is universal, the punishments that arise from it vary widely. In some countries, the six-month sentence would be within the normal range. That is, it would satisfy the desire for justice. In other places, anything less than death would be too lenient.
When vengeance as the basis for policy outweighs the more rational factors like deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation, you get juggernauts like the war on drugs, which was mostly vengeance under a veneer of deterrence. In the initial response to the perceived drug problem, politicians enacted harsher sentences to send a message to drug users and dealers. When these new laws failed to bring the promised reduction in crime, lawmakers might have paused to rethink their assumptions. Instead, they fell all over themselves proposing even harsher sentences, locking up more people for longer periods of time.
Doing more of the same thing and expecting a different result might be a definition of insanity. But in the war on drugs, it functioned like an addiction – addiction to punishment. When a mild amount didn’t have the desired effect, lawmakers (with public approval) raised the dose. We then became habituated to that new level, we thought that only an even higher dose would bring relief. We were punishment junkies, spending more and more of our money on something that brought little relief, all the while raising our level of tolerance. We wound up with “normal” sentences that people in many other Western countries considered medieval.
In the swimmer-rapist case, the people outraged by the six-month sentence are not campaigning for generally harsher sentences for rape. They are, however, demanding the equivalent of a policy change – replacing the judge. But the motive is the same – justice (or vengeance). If we can’t punish the rapist, then let’s try to punish the judge and replace him with someone who gives out sentences that make us feel better. Of course, only the self-delusional will think that punishing the rapist or the judge will have any effect on fratboy date-rape.
One final note: I am not saying that those who want a longer sentence for Turner are wrong. I’m not saying they’re right. What I am saying is that whoever enters that argument on either side should be clear as to the bases of their position. They should also recognize that the issue is one of morals or values, so unlike questions of deterrence, it cannot be resolved with facts.
Ceci n’est pas the Active Voice
June 8, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston
My brother volunteers as a reader of audiobooks. His latest assignment was a methods text – Research Methods in Social Relations, 8th edition (Geoffrey Maruyama and Carey S. Ryan, Wiley, 2014). In the last chapter, on p. 511, he read this:
Posted by Jay Livingston
My brother volunteers as a reader of audiobooks. His latest assignment was a methods text – Research Methods in Social Relations, 8th edition (Geoffrey Maruyama and Carey S. Ryan, Wiley, 2014). In the last chapter, on p. 511, he read this:
| The use of the first person and the active voice is now preferred over the third person and the passive voice. The past tense is used when reporting the past research of others and in describing your own procedures. The present tense is used to discuss results currently in front of the reader ... |
Political Ideas, Political Tactics
June 7, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston
A comment on the previous post claimed that political correctness is “bullying people.” The comment ignored most of the content of the post, which was about the tactic of using the term political correctness as a strategy used by bullies divert attention away from their bullying. The comment also confuses two dimensions – ideas and tactics. It’s a common enough mistake. Even the Wikipedia entry doesn’t keep ideas distinct from tactics.
The first sentence refers to ideas, as did my previous post (“comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable”). The second sentence describes a rhetorical strategy: when you want to vilify something (in this case political correctness) go to extremes. Find examples of the most extreme version of the ideas and the most extreme tactics of its supporters. Once the phrase has become a pejorative, anything that can be labeled as politically correct must automatically be wrong.
But most people use the term to refer not to tactics but to ideas or values (e.g., “New York values”). To say that replacing Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 is politically correct, or supporting gay marriage, or hoping that the Washington Redskins pick a different name, or thinking that women, Blacks, and LGBT people ought not be excluded from syllabuses or TV shows and that Donald Trump shouldn’t call women bimbos – these and a host of other issues, all of them labeled as politically correct, have nothing to do with tactics and everything to do with ideas and principles.
Bullying is a tactic, not an idea, and it is used by supporters of all sorts of political ideas. Anti-abortion activists scream into the faces women going to abortion clinics. Some even firebomb the clinics and make death threats against practitioners. In fact nowadays, thanks to the Internet, people from all over the political spectrum make death threats and use other vile tactics that all fall under the category of bullying.
The “political correctness = bullying” conflation illustrates another aspect of muddied thinking – “motivated cognition”: our feelings about the ideas affect our perception of the tactics. It’s like the football fan’s perception of pass interference or holding or some other infraction – whether we see a player’s tactic as legal or illegal depends on which side we’re rooting for. The classic 1954 study “They Saw a Game” documents this kind of motivated cognition among students following a controversial Dartmouth-Princeton football game.
More recently, in 2012 Dan Kahan and his colleagues did a similar study – “They Saw a Protest” (pdf here). All subjects were shown the the same video of protesters and police. Some were told that the protest took place outside an abortion clinic and that the protesters were anti-abortion. Others subjects were told that the scene was a military recruiting center and that the demonstrators were protesting the Army’s anti-gay “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy (still in effect in when the study was done).
Subjects were told to imagine that they were on a jury and that the video was key evidence in a case where the protesters were suing the police. One of the basic questions was whether the police had violated the free-speech rights of the protesters. On the whole, there was little difference between those who were told that the protest was at an abortion clinic (49% said yes, the police had violated the protesters’ rights) and those who were told it was at a recruiting office (45%). That’s on the whole. Separating the subjects according to political views revealed sharp differences in perceptions.
The measure of the subjects’ political orientation was not the usual liberal-conservative dimension but instead a space marked off by two axes: One axis is the Hierarchical-Egalitarian. Egalitarians think we should strive for greater equality in society; Hierarchicals are OK with current inequalities of race, class, and gender. The other axis is Individual-Communitarian – basically about the role of government. Is the government interfering too much in our lives (Individual), or is it not doing enough to improve things (Communitarian)? Translated into more conventional political categories, the Hierarchical and Individual would be conservative, the Egalitarian and Communitarian would be liberal.
Hierarchicals (solid lines in each graph) were much more likely to say the police were at fault when the protest was against an abortion clinic than against a recruitment center. As they saw it, the protest at the military recruitment center – that was dangerous so the police had to move in. But when the protesters were anti-abortion, how dare the police bust up a legitimate protest. For the Egalitarians (dash lines), those positions were reversed. Basically, if we agree with the protesters, we perceive the police as violating their rights. If we disagree with the protesters, the police are just lawfully doing their job.
Politics shaped perception on an even more factual question: had the protesters blocked people from entering the building? Again, when the protest was at the recruitment center, Egalitarians saw the protesters as relatively benign, Hierarchicals saw them as a threat to pedestrians and others. When the protest was at the abortion clinic, those perceptions flipped.
But wait, there’s more, and it gets worse. Not only does our ideology influence what we see, but we fail to recognize that connection, assuming instead that we are merely calling them not just as we see them but as they objectively are. At the same time, says Kahan, we are quick to spot the motivated perception of people we disagree with. The result is that we think those we disagree with are not just wrong but that they are acting in bad faith, deliberately misperceiving a peaceful protest as a violent mob or vice-versa.
Posted by Jay Livingston
A comment on the previous post claimed that political correctness is “bullying people.” The comment ignored most of the content of the post, which was about the tactic of using the term political correctness as a strategy used by bullies divert attention away from their bullying. The comment also confuses two dimensions – ideas and tactics. It’s a common enough mistake. Even the Wikipedia entry doesn’t keep ideas distinct from tactics.
| Political correctness (adjectivally: politically correct), commonly abbreviated to PC, is a term which, in modern usage, is used to describe language, policies, or measures which are intended not to offend or disadvantage any particular group of people in society. In the media, the term is generally used as a pejorative, implying that these policies are excessive. |
The first sentence refers to ideas, as did my previous post (“comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable”). The second sentence describes a rhetorical strategy: when you want to vilify something (in this case political correctness) go to extremes. Find examples of the most extreme version of the ideas and the most extreme tactics of its supporters. Once the phrase has become a pejorative, anything that can be labeled as politically correct must automatically be wrong.
But most people use the term to refer not to tactics but to ideas or values (e.g., “New York values”). To say that replacing Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 is politically correct, or supporting gay marriage, or hoping that the Washington Redskins pick a different name, or thinking that women, Blacks, and LGBT people ought not be excluded from syllabuses or TV shows and that Donald Trump shouldn’t call women bimbos – these and a host of other issues, all of them labeled as politically correct, have nothing to do with tactics and everything to do with ideas and principles.
Bullying is a tactic, not an idea, and it is used by supporters of all sorts of political ideas. Anti-abortion activists scream into the faces women going to abortion clinics. Some even firebomb the clinics and make death threats against practitioners. In fact nowadays, thanks to the Internet, people from all over the political spectrum make death threats and use other vile tactics that all fall under the category of bullying.
The “political correctness = bullying” conflation illustrates another aspect of muddied thinking – “motivated cognition”: our feelings about the ideas affect our perception of the tactics. It’s like the football fan’s perception of pass interference or holding or some other infraction – whether we see a player’s tactic as legal or illegal depends on which side we’re rooting for. The classic 1954 study “They Saw a Game” documents this kind of motivated cognition among students following a controversial Dartmouth-Princeton football game.
More recently, in 2012 Dan Kahan and his colleagues did a similar study – “They Saw a Protest” (pdf here). All subjects were shown the the same video of protesters and police. Some were told that the protest took place outside an abortion clinic and that the protesters were anti-abortion. Others subjects were told that the scene was a military recruiting center and that the demonstrators were protesting the Army’s anti-gay “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy (still in effect in when the study was done).
The measure of the subjects’ political orientation was not the usual liberal-conservative dimension but instead a space marked off by two axes: One axis is the Hierarchical-Egalitarian. Egalitarians think we should strive for greater equality in society; Hierarchicals are OK with current inequalities of race, class, and gender. The other axis is Individual-Communitarian – basically about the role of government. Is the government interfering too much in our lives (Individual), or is it not doing enough to improve things (Communitarian)? Translated into more conventional political categories, the Hierarchical and Individual would be conservative, the Egalitarian and Communitarian would be liberal.
(Click on the graph for a larger view.)
Hierarchicals (solid lines in each graph) were much more likely to say the police were at fault when the protest was against an abortion clinic than against a recruitment center. As they saw it, the protest at the military recruitment center – that was dangerous so the police had to move in. But when the protesters were anti-abortion, how dare the police bust up a legitimate protest. For the Egalitarians (dash lines), those positions were reversed. Basically, if we agree with the protesters, we perceive the police as violating their rights. If we disagree with the protesters, the police are just lawfully doing their job.
Politics shaped perception on an even more factual question: had the protesters blocked people from entering the building? Again, when the protest was at the recruitment center, Egalitarians saw the protesters as relatively benign, Hierarchicals saw them as a threat to pedestrians and others. When the protest was at the abortion clinic, those perceptions flipped.
But wait, there’s more, and it gets worse. Not only does our ideology influence what we see, but we fail to recognize that connection, assuming instead that we are merely calling them not just as we see them but as they objectively are. At the same time, says Kahan, we are quick to spot the motivated perception of people we disagree with. The result is that we think those we disagree with are not just wrong but that they are acting in bad faith, deliberately misperceiving a peaceful protest as a violent mob or vice-versa.
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