Judicial Nominations

One of the reactions to Justice Kennedy's retirement that I saw pointed out that Republicans have nominated more justices to the Supreme Court in the last two or three decades despite the fact that the Democrats have won the popular vote (although not necessarily the presidency) more often in that time.

So I decided to go ahead and figure out how many nominations were made by each party, going back to the New Deal and FDR. It wasn't really that hard; Wikipedia's lists of Supreme Court justices and US presidents provided all the information I need.

It turns out the Democrats have it, albeit only barely; they nominated 21 justices since 1937, whereas the Republicans nominated 20. (Technically 19; I'm counting President Trump's impending nomination to replace Justice Kennedy.) Of course, just under half of the Democratic nominations came during FDR's very long time in office; remove his nine from the list, and the Republicans win easily.

In light of that, graphs like this one which show the median Supreme Court justice being on the conservative side more often than not over the time period in question aren't surprising. That's reassuring in some ways, since it implies that liberals can see results they like out of the Supreme Court even if things generally trend conservative... but that's still a very faint silver lining.

Reacting to the Truth

Here we go again.

This mass shooting is close enough to home that as it turns out, some people I've known for years have been deeply affected by it.

As it turns out, the gunman in this case had a personal grudge against the Capital Gazette; apparently he was a bit unhappy that they'd reported on a harassment case involving him, including the fact that he'd pled guilty. His efforts to sue the newspaper for their reporting were dismissed due to the simple fact that they had reported nothing but the truth. Unfortunately, it turns out some people would rather lash out in whatever way they can rather than accept that... and in a country with so many guns as ours, some of those people are going to lash out in that way.

Those people who lash out at the news media in other ways should take note: Your reaction being less extreme does not make it any more justified. If there's an actual error in reporting, it should be noted and corrected... but all too often, what we see instead is that people get unhappy because the truthful reports they see aren't telling them what they want to hear. That's not something our society can or should tolerate.

Progress Report

With yesterday's post, I've now hit the second month in a row where I wrote more blog posts per month than in any of the years prior to this one. So I'm feeling pretty good about the level of effort I've managed to put into this project. I will note that much of the reason I started doing this was as a test for myself to see if I could maintain a useful level of effort, so I'm counting my primary goal met so far - and I'm not done yet, of course. (Next month, given the lack of expected distractions, should show me whether I can actually get up to posting 80% or 90% of the days of the month, for example.)

I would certainly be happier if more people were reading what I have to say, but there will be time to build up more of a following later if I decide it's worth the additional effort to do so. For now, for those of you that are reading, I'd like to take the chance to explicitly ask for feedback. What do you think of what you've read so far? Is there anything you'd like to see me do differently or any topics you specifically want to see me talk about?

Anything you have to say is welcome, whether it's something I can use to adjust, criticism of the way I think, or simply words of encouragement. Thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to do so!

Abortion and Free Speech

Believe it or not, I'm actually a bit conflicted over the result of the Supreme Court case regarding a crisis pregnancy center in California and the messages about abortion availability they were required to post.

I think the best way to put it is that I can easily understand how requiring someone to provide information about a service that wasn't even requested in the first place falls outside the scope of one's professional responsibility. If your entire practice is built around addressing a given problem in a specific way, and that's made clear to your customers at the outset, then requiring any more information about methods you don't provide may be a bit much.

... Of course, several caveats apply. Most CPCs, for example, would never dream of actually warning people that they will not provide any support or advice regarding abortion. Some of them will go so far as to actively lie about the risks of an abortion. If the people approaching you are looking to discuss all of their options when they're pregnant, either is almost certainly malpractice, and I have no problem with the state withholding licenses from organizations that operate that way.

So in the end, while I don't think I'd have gone as far as the California law that was struck down did, I'm irritated that the likely result is going to be these centers lying with more impunity, whether by omission or outright.

At least I can console myself with the fact that my side now gets to ask pointed questions about compelling speech designed to limit or discourage abortions. It's less useful for us; I do want to make sure that women are aware of all their options and wouldn't want to not give them a full picture of what carrying to term and either giving up the child for adoption or keeping them would entail. Still, I imagine it'd be a lot easier on some people if it could be omitted or reduced when it clearly made sense to do so.

Data Requests

Frankly, my first reaction to this article about how various scientific groups are asking people to donate increasingly drastic amounts of personal data for research benefits was fairly simple:

I'm pretty sure I've seen this plot line before... and it didn't exactly end well for the protagonists. In fact, the misuse of the data the protagonist provided set up the villains' entire plan. (A Certain Scientific Railgun S, in case anyone is wondering exactly what anime I was thinking of.)

However, for all my random anime references, I am capable of recognizing the good that can come out of this sort of thing as well. I think we need to be careful about churning through massive amounts of data hunting for any useful pattern, because when one does that sort of thing, patterns tend to show up whether they are significant and useful or not. But some of the things we find by taking advantage of our ability to analyze all of this data and recheck other conclusions against it will certainly be useful.

As the article notes, I think the key is going to be in robust notification about how and why that data is being used. Part of the utility of such giant data requests is going to be in using them for whatever comes up, but doing so without ensuring that the donors know where their information is going could all too easily lead to serious problems. The only way to safeguard against it is to make sure that donors are notified when a new project that would use their data is proposed.

The Importance of Turnout

I like reading articles about how we study voting patterns and how we determine what does and doesn't improve turnout. To be blunt, that's mostly because I think the generally poor turnout in the US is an urgent problem facing our democracy, and because I like having new ways to talk about it and new evidence to point to.

I've never been that happy with the simplest expedient of urging people to vote and shaming them when they don't. It certainly can have an effect, but I think we do better by ourselves and our friends when we look at ways to play up the impact voting has or how to make it easier to do without compromising the accuracy of our vote.

This article is a case in point. It shows how a simple comparison between areas in the US can tell us a lot about this problem, it gives us more information about what sort of benefits are good and which aren't worth the trouble, and it offers a simple solution. That does also suggest that we should be willing to make seemingly large changes in our system; I'm sure some people wouldn't consider changing how and when we submit our votes simple or minor.

That article also does call out one point I think is important: I don't actually believe that fraud is currently enough of a problem to justify measures that will severely depress turnout. Our system can more easily survive fraud at current levels than it can survive even more people not voting because they don't feel they have the time or money to secure everything they need.

Anime review: Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale

So apparently including a mysterious diva in a anime movie is a great way to get me to like it - it worked with the Index/Railgun movie, and now it's working again with SAO.

... Okay, that's not the only reason.

For anyone not familiar with it, Sword Art Online is a book series, which got made into a TV anime series, which has spawned a truly ridiculous number of spin-off manga, anime, and games. It focuses on two gamers, Kirito and Asuna, who are some of the first players to join a virtual reality online game using a system that allows them to completely dive into the game's world... only to discover that they can't log out or shut down the system in order to return to the real world, and that dying in the game will cause the system to kill them in real life as well.

It has its problems; Kirito in particular often reaches Boring Invincible Hero levels of power for no apparent reason. But it's still one of my favorite series of all time, because I greatly enjoy the way it brings up issues and philosophical questions that are quite relevant to the world we live in. 

The SAO movie - which is set after all of the currently released seasons of the anime, so spoilers not just for the movie but for the entire anime run may follow - certainly follows in the TV anime's footsteps in that regard. And that's not even the only reason to like it!

In its case, one of the major details driving the plot is the memories many of the characters have of the time they spent forced to remain in the original game world - and one of the justifications the villains use is that they dismiss the value of those memories and assume that everyone who was forced to risk their lives to try and clear the game would rather forget all of it because of the stress and fear involved. It builds nicely on one of the messages from the original anime; namely, that what we do in a virtual world - whether that's an actual game or anything else online - can still be a very real, significant part of who we are.

The movie also avoided a lot of the traps that the original anime fell into. The villains' plot was easily understandable; it made sense that they would want to do the things they did, even if they were evil. The advantages they had were telegraphed, but not so clearly as to ruin everything before the dramatic moment in which Kirito figures the problem out. And while it took a minute for me to understand why one of the final sequences was necessary for the main characters to win, it did become clear in the end why that needed to be a part of the plot.

Overall, I'm quite glad with the movie... now they just need to hurry up and get to the next seasons of the anime that they're planning to release.

Global Warming Predictions

Thirty years ago, a scientist named James Hansen testified before Congress about the dangers of global warming and his predictions for what global warming would look like.

Amusingly, both supporters and skeptics of global warming are claiming that the actual warming over the last thirty years supports their point of view. Or perhaps the word I'm looking for is "irritatingly". It's a little bit of both.

The skeptical article from the Wall Street Journal claims that what we've actually observed matches Hansen's third scenario the most closely - that was the scenario in which emissions stopped increasing in 2000. Of course, right after the note that "Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000," comes the caveat: "...discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16."

I'll grant that whether the first half of that comment is true or not (I don't think it is, to be clear) does depend a bit on how one defines "significant" warming. Even without debating that point, though, discounting El Niño years doesn't seem like a great idea to me - or, at least, if you're going to do it, you should also take into account the effects like La Niña that might result in cooler temperatures. For example, you could compare trend lines for just the El Niño years, or just the La Niña years, or just the neutral years. If you do something like that - as seen in this article - you get a fairly clear picture of how temperatures are still getting warmer.

Facts and Opinions

This Pew study on how good Americans are at distinguishing between factual and opinion statements in the news is simultaneously awesome, depressing, and a bit encouraging. I like it a lot, because I think trying to measure this sort of thing is extremely interesting, but the results they came up with are mixed at best.

Of course, if you want to try your hand at telling the difference, you can do that here.

The study does offer some reason for optimism - over half of the people in the survey group were able to get a majority of the questions correct. Each question was also answered correctly by a majority of the people who responded, although in one or two cases it was a very small majority. And I liked noting that people who are very politically aware and who trust the news media tended to do better than those that didn't, because it shows there actually might be some benefit in trying to keep people informed.

On the other hand, there weren't very many people that actually managed to get all of the statements right, and the way in which errors showed up pretty clearly shows that a lot of the public is quite willing to engage in motivated reasoning, whether or not they realize that's what they're doing.

Judicial Discretion and Bail

Add this to the myriad list of ways in which our justice system is not as scrupulously fair as it really needs to be: the way in which it determines who gets bail and who doesn't can vary quite a bit depending on exactly what judge is in charge. 

... Well, okay, I'll qualify that a little bit. I'd really like more data, because it's difficult to tell what the proper exercise of the average judge's discretion is supposed to look like.

Certainly, the numbers in this article seem to argue that the difference is too wide to be explained by anything other than differences in the criteria used by various judges. In particular, the fact that there are differences between judges working in the same area needs a convincing explanation, because I expect their case loads would feature similar types of people. It's hard to believe that one judge just happens to get a majority of people who cannot be trusted to return without bail and another judge gets a majority of people who can be released on their own recognizance. And the anecdotes featured later in the article support the idea that there's quite a bit of subjectivity in this process.

That said, I think a proper measure of success in this matter is less about how similar all the judges' numbers are and more about how many decisions they make correctly. If all the judges were closer to the median, it would still be possible that all of them were being too lenient or too harsh. Which is why I say I want more data; ensuring we are applying bail equally would certainly be better than the current state, but I see no reason not to aim for the right balance between ensuring our justice system can still function and avoiding as much damage as possible to defendants' lives.

Unfortunately, figuring out where we were overly harsh would be extremely difficult, since I don't know of any good way to figure out who out of the people held on bail would have returned even without that incentive. Figuring out where we were too lenient, on the other hand, seems like it would be quite easy - those are the people who were released on their own recognizance (or with a very small bail) and don't return for their trials. That suggests to me that a good judge should err on the side of leniency but keep track of how many people aren't coming back in order to ensure that they aren't going too far. 

Mistaken Arguments

Here's a fun question to ponder: Does making a mistake as you debate an issue automatically mean you're wrong?

The short answer is no - this is formally called the argument from fallacy (although I prefer fallacy fallacy myself).

It's come up as I see liberals being criticized on social media and in other areas for a few of the pictures featuring detained children. Some of them were actually from President Obama's term. Others were from protests or otherwise aren't actually detained immigrants. All of them leave the left looking more than a bit foolish.

... and it still doesn't change the simple fact that immigrant parents are being separated from their children.

Nor does it change the fact that it is within President Trump's power to unilaterally resolve the issue. He doesn't even have to refuse to prosecute some immigrants; all he has to do is instruct the authorities to set a date for them to come back for hearings/trials and then let them go. Some of them won't come back, sure, but I'd rather be dealing with that problem than the one we have right now.

So if you want to make some liberals look like fools, sure, you can keep bringing up points like this. In the end, though, it's not going to bring us any closer to a resolution on this issue, because doing so doesn't actually make those liberals wrong.

Immigration Detention Compromise

The number of Republican leaders that have made statements against our current policy to separate adults and children detained for illegal immigration is certainly a rather nice thing to see. It would be nicer, though, if it actually looked like it was going to result in a change to that policy. Right now it seems like the administration is still insisting on a compromise that changes the policy in exchange for the usual Republican wish list: tougher enforcement, money for the wall, etc.

Which does kind of beg the question: why is a compromise even necessary? Both sides seem to want family separation to end, so why do we need to worry about who wants other things and what we're willing to trade for them?

I think it helps throw some light on things if we look at how we got here. Well, that and I want to spell out exactly how what President Trump is doing is different from what was done under previous administrations.

President Obama did face similar problems when he was trying to figure out what to do with families of illegal immigrants, and he took quite a bit of criticism for his detention centers. The critical difference, though, is that President Obama's solution was to put the whole family in a detention center together. The major problem that came up was that it's not actually legal to keep minors in detention for that long (this is because of the Flores lawsuit that frequently gets mentioned), whether or not their parents are with them. As far as I know, there was never actually a solution to this; President Obama left office with the question unresolved. Some families were just let go, some were allowed out of detention pending trial, and some remained in detention contrary to the federal courts' orders.

Then President Trump entered office. As far as I can tell, he has absolutely zero interest in making immigration enforcement any harder than it has to be, so the first two options that involve letting people out of jail are out. And he also doesn't want to detain the kids longer than he is legally allowed to. Which means the kids are removed from detention, and the parents stay. I suppose he probably doesn't want to separate families, but he also doesn't want to let people out of detention pending trial, and he certainly doesn't want to not charge them at all.

Which sets up the compromise, as the Republicans see it: First, they give up on demanding pre-trial detention, both making it harder to enforce immigration law, which they don't want, and avoiding separating families, which they do want. But, since that's neutral overall for them, they're also going to demand something they actually want out of the whole situation.

It also, however, sets up my response for my Republican friends: If you're only willing to avoid separating families because you get something else you want out of it, then it's going to look like you don't care about the problem all that much, and you will take some criticism for it. If you want to avoid that outcome, you may have to give up on getting as much as you originally wanted out of this situation.

Game review: Budget Cuts

Because of course the right response to automation taking your coworkers' jobs is to sneak through your office and assassinate all the robots that have been taking their jobs with office supplies (e.g. scissors, letter openers) on your way to discuss the matter with the CEO.

... Wait, that's not the right answer? Well, that's what the main character has to do in Budget Cuts. All of your human coworkers keep getting summoned to meetings with HR, and they're not being seen again (at all, I mean, not just in the "they're fired and leave immediately" sense). Luckily, a mysterious friend has sent you a pager and uses it to send you codes you can use to receive messages and advice from her - between that and your prototype teleporter, it's time to see if you can escape whatever fate has befallen your coworkers.

It really is worth it. The enemy units in the game can only see your head, so there's real benefit to crawling around on the floor in order to hide behind cubicle walls or climb through narrow ducts. Even though the primary movement is teleporting, there's also benefits to walking around in your play area to peer around corners or get exactly the right angle on a teleport. These feel like exactly the sort of mechanics that a VR game should be taking advantage of, even if they can be a bit hard on my knees. The throwing mechanics (the only way to kill enemies) feel a bit frustrating to me - it's really hard to actually hit anything more than a few feet away, and quickly upgrades to impossible if the anything in question is actually moving - but it's also possible that I just suck at throwing things.

The story is certainly a bit silly, but still offers enough weird questions about the exact nature of what's going on to keep you engaged the whole way through. About my only concern there is that the game (like many other current VR offerings) is a bit short, and it ends with the dreaded "to be continued" - which was an irritatingly unexpected lack of a concrete end to the story.

... of course, it's not going to stop me from buying the continuation, when or if it comes out. Indeed, I look forward to seeing what else these people come up with.

Disruptive Innovation and Incremental Improvements

I'll go ahead and say it: I don't actually like Elon Musk very much.

Well, perhaps that's going a bit far. I give him a lot of credit for his willingness to move forward with bold projects and new ideas, even when it comes with a fair bit of personal expense or risk. I think some of his ideas are legitimately quite awesome and the sort of things we're going to need as we continue trying to make some of our science fiction into reality.

However, the confidence with which he tends to push everything he's involved in doesn't always mesh well with the reality that some experiments and innovation fail. That confidence becomes downright annoying when an would-be innovator tries to disrupt an existing field and force it to change for the sake of an idea that isn't going to work.

... And that brings me to Elon Musk and mass transit, whether it's his first Hyperloop concept or his most recent deal to build high-speed rail between Chicago O'Hare Airport and the city center.

Here's the problem: We know how to build a commercially viable train system. They're in operation in countless parts of the world. The fact that the US is not one of those places does theoretically argue that a more innovative idea would help... but before we try to totally reinvent mass transit, I'd argue that actually following some of the best practices the rest of the world uses might help. At least if we're going to propose more innovative ideas, we should probably try to avoid making them worse than what we already know how to do!

What really baffles me about the whole thing is that Elon Musk is clearly not stupid - otherwise he'd not have succeeded in so many different ways. And yet proposing something that has so much less carrying capacity than a typical subway and calling it "high capacity" seems like an obvious error, nor is it the only such problem with his mass transit ideas. That's probably the biggest reason why I have a more general dislike of Musk instead of stopping at just questioning how well things like this will work.

School Choice

The way both sides' battle lines are breaking down on a recent effort by NYC mayor Bill de Blasio to decrease the role that admissions exams play in gaining entrance to some of the best high schools in the city shouldn't surprise much of anyone. The Wall Street Journal's columnists call it "The Attack on Educational Excellence", whereas their counterparts from the New York Times are debating whether it's necessary to get rid of racism or not.

I actually don't quite like either side's position, although it shouldn't surprise much of anyone that I'm more sympathetic to the liberal argument than the conservative one.

So I'll start with my problem with my own side. Essentially, the notion that the admissions exam should play no role at all does seem a bit suspect to me. If nothing else, I don't think it does anyone much good to risk bringing in new students who are not prepared for the challenge facing them, nor do I think it does the school much good to give them a challenge their teachers may not be as ready to face as they think they are. Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to keep the test as a means of ensuring that all of the prospective students are ready to succeed without it also being used to favor those prospective students that already have more resources and time to spend on preparing for it, but I also think that having something is necessary.

That said, the notions on the other side that teachers' unions are responsible for the inadequacy of our existing public schools - or that the solution is to abandon them entirely and rely on charter schools and the free market - is not even remotely true. Part of the reason I talked above about handing teachers a challenge they may not be ready for is that it turns out a lot of the really good schools that get cited by conservatives as examples of the free market's success got that way by not having to deal with students that might bring their numbers down. If the goal is to help everyone succeed, we don't have that option when dealing with the entire system.

In that sense, I think the point that the one NYT editorial makes is closest to the right answer - we need to be looking to make all of our schools into elite schools, and if that costs us a lot of money and effort, then so be it.

Detecting Evil

Today's inspiration is a nice piece from the Friendly Atheist about how abusers can manipulate church groups into taking their side and neglecting their victims.

Really, though, it's not just churches that have a problem with this. There are a lot of news stories of horrific crimes that feature friends and family of the culprit talking about how they were such a good person, and they can't believe that the culprit could possibly have done something like this. A lot of the rest feature people that were obviously kind of strange, but still not to the point that everyone around them took decisive action. (To be fair, the examples where something useful is done tend not to make the news as easily. It'd probably be interesting to try and analyze how often something slips past everyone versus how often things get caught, but I have no idea how one would even start to work on that.)

It seems that in real life it's a lot harder to detect evil than one might think. It's enough to make me decline to put that much stock in character references, particularly when they're used to question whether someone actually did hurt or insult someone else.

I think it's worth remembering for anyone that people can be more complicated than just how they act around you; just because you've never seen them act a different way isn't sufficient to prove that they never will or that they never have. That doesn't mean we have to automatically assume everyone around us is hiding some secret evil, and if someone has held to a given pattern of behavior around you, it's fair to trust that they will continue to do so. But if someone else says they act differently in other environments and around other people, your experience alone isn't sufficient to prove that accusation false.

Incremental Progress

So President Trump and Kim Jong Un signed an agreement at their summit today in Singapore. The text of it is available from pretty much any news site - I'll just post a link to this one because it's the one I had open while I was writing this.

I'm glad we did this. The agreement's not much; North Korea has broken deals with more weight behind them before. But if we want to lessen the risk of going to war with them, this is how we do it. Frankly, even if this doesn't ultimately lead to North Korea disarming and a more permanently peaceful relationship with them, I still think it's a good idea. It gives us more time at a lower risk of war, more time for the situation to change in other ways that might (or might not) take us closer to peace. It's not much of a chance, but it's still better than moving closer to war.

The one thing I'm not looking forward to is what I suspect we're all about to hear from President Trump's more ardent supporters. I strongly suspect they're going to cheer for the progress we're making... despite the fact that they've criticized other politicians in the past for even suggesting that we should take steps in this direction. That's probably uncharitable of me; I should just be happy that they're willing to support what I think is the right answer... but if these people are going to support this course of action now, is it too much to ask to hear them admit that means they were wrong before?

The Value of a Discussion

File under the list of famous people believing stupid things: this interview of a basketball player in which he refuses to say that the earth is round, instead asking a bunch of questions about how we can prove it's round and talking about how irritated people get with him for questioning it.

So first, in the spirit of this XKCD comic: Yes, I can quite easily prove the earth is round. It's why objects traveling over the horizon disappear from the bottom up - something that anyone can go see for themselves by going down to a shoreline and watching ships sail away. The last thing you'll see is the ship's mast (although you'll probably need a decent pair of binoculars to get a good look). Even if you don't happen to live near a shoreline, you can run the same experiment yourself with any large flat area and a tall object - once you get far enough away from the tall object you've chosen, you'll only see the top of it. At that point all we need is a simple picture (not to scale, obviously) to show that this is what we'd expect to see if we live on a ball and there's our proof.

But there's a larger point to make about whether this sort of discussion is a good use of our time. I'll grant that it forces people to ask questions that help educate everyone around them, so there is some benefit to be found, but I'd still argue that it's not all that helpful. It doesn't help us discover anything new, it doesn't help illuminate what we do and don't value (or how we'd rank the things we value against each other)... it's just a simple "oh, you don't know this answer? Here it is".

Which is useful to some people, and we need to react to people in a way that allows them to ask the question in the first place. However, if that answer isn't acceptable, and the questioner wants to continue the discussion, at that point it is perfectly fair to ask them to produce reasons why the initial answer isn't sufficient - and to criticize them if they are unable or unwilling to provide good reasons. And the initial answer being a bit obscure or counter-intuitive at first glance is not generally a good reason.

One of the comments in that interview is "Does it really bother you that much that I think something different than you or that I actually want to have that conversation?" My answer is - if you don't have anything useful to say, then yes, it does bother me, because that's not a helpful discussion to have.