Pun Salad

It's by Steven Pinker, acclaimed Harvard smart guy. I'm a fan, and his books get an automatic buy from me.

This one is on a huge topic, see the title: rationality. He mentions that it's based out of a course he gave for Harvard undergrads. In fact, at a number of points where Pinker makes some quip in the middle of a chapter, I found myself thinking: that probably got a few chuckles in the lecture hall.

What is rationality? For Pinker, it's a bundle of methods that are effective in moving us toward our worthy goals, most notably truth, progress, and prosperity. It's avoiding fallacies and biases. (There are a lot of those, and for your convenience, there's a separate index of them, about four pages worth.) But it's also avoiding silly (but common) mistakes; there's a long discussion of the so-called Monty Hall Problem, where a lot of Very Smart People got caught not thinking things through.

A lot of different topics are breezed through: basic logic; von Neumann's "choice theory" axioms; game theory; multiple regression; Bayes' Theorem; causation vs. correlation; statistical significance; … well, you get the idea. It's a real Cook's tour.

Simply by coincidence, I read this concurrently with another book, Escaping Paternalism by Mario J. Rizzo and Glen Whitman, that covered a lot of similar ground from a much different angle. A report will be forthcoming on that someday. And (for some reason) I seem to have been reading a lot of others in this ballpark in the past few years: The WEIRDest People in the World; Consciousness Explained; The Scout Mindset; Priceless; The Hidden Half; The Mind Club; The Origins of Virtue; Science Fictions; How to Think; and of course the biggie: Daniel Kahnemann's Thinking Fast and Slow, way back when.

So there's (kind of) the bad news: there wasn't a lot new, at least for me, in Pinker's book. And the last couple chapters break off from the science and move toward sermonizing, with a hefty dose of one-sided political animosity. Hey, I didn't like Trump either, but Pinker almost made me want to defend him.

And I was somewhat disappointed that Robert Nozick, another smart guy who was also at Harvard, didn't get a reference. He wrote a whole book titled The Nature of Rationality back in 1993. (Guilty confession: It's on my bookshelf, where it's been sitting unread for about 28 years.)

And kind of a wince-inducing assertion at the beginning of Chapter Ten, labeling the idea that Covid-19 "was a bioweapon engineered in a Chinese lab" as one of the "cockamamie conspiracy theories" surrounding the disease. To be fair, this is listed among a number of other conspiracy theories that really are cockamamie. And I don't think Covid-19 was intentionally designed and released as a "bioweapon". But I don't think the "lab leak" theory is even close to cockamamie, and a coverup conspiracy isn't unlikely at all.

• Well, that and the inappropriate laughter. Jonah Goldberg stumbles across the answer: Kamala Harris’ Big Problem? She Was a Bad Pick in the First Place.

  Harris was a bad pick from the start. Her failed presidential campaign seemed to be based on the assumption that Twitter and TikTok likes would win delegates in the Democratic primary. Whatever personal charm she has—or skills she had as a prosecutor or a senator—hasn’t translated for a national audience.

  But she was the inevitable pick once Biden decided he needed to select a black woman as his running mate. Her keenest supporters—a very thin slice of Very Online Democratic activists—are trying to cast her travails through the prisms of racism and sexism.

  Such defenses strike me as evidence they don’t know how to do any other kind of politics—only the kind where every setback looks racist and sexist.

  This racist and sexist blogger is strongly considering voting for Nikki Haley in 2024.

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• Or how about "Reciting Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, backwards, on Ellen." Vodkapundit relates the veep's dismal record so far (border crisis, France, running her own office) and has suggestions for what else President Wheezy could assign her: Top Ten Other Kamala Harris Make-Work Jobs.

  10. Spearhead effort for reducing hyperactivity in aging tree sloths
  11. Negotiate a trade deal with Antarctica
  12. “Waffle Cones vs. Sugar Cones: A Six-Hour Powerpoint Presentation for President Joe Biden (Eyes Only)”
  13. Undercover investigation of Chicago South Side gang areas

  … and six more. Hey, how about "warm-up act for Mike Birbiglia"?

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• Euphemism watch. Mark Jamison reveals: Net neutrality is about control, not consumers. After reviewing the near-total lack of necessity for "neutrality":

  With so much scholarly research showing that net neutrality regulations are harmful, why do so many in Congress and the Biden administration push for them? Perhaps Sohn let the answer slip during her confirmation hearing:

  The net neutrality debate, which I have been [in] now for 20 years, is really more about whether there is going to be oversight. . . . It’s really much broader than the no blocking and throttling. . . . We cannot leave an essential service such as broadband without oversight.

  There are at least two problems with Sohn’s statement. First, it’s a non sequitur: It doesn’t follow that everything important should be under government control. In fact, given the political and bureaucratic incentives inherent in regulation, an argument could be made that the opposite is often true. Second, Sohn’s unstated premise — that absent the FCC imposing net neutrality regulations, there is no regulatory oversight — is false. The Federal Trade Commission provides consumer protection oversight along with privacy and competition regulations for broadband. Moreover, states also have consumer protection regulations, and the FCC maintains light-handed oversight under the rules established during Chairman Pai’s tenure.

  As P. J. O'Rourke famously said: "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." There's nothing wrong with the Internet that the FCC can't make much worse.

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• I never meta-level I didn't like. Bryan Caplan explains why we shy away from the obvious. It's The Default of Fear. His inspriation is the Wikipedia article on Gender bias on Wikipedia. (See, we're already getting meta.) Why are there so few female Wikipedia editors? A former director made a list of possible reasons:

  1. A lack of user-friendliness in the editing interface.
  2. Not having enough free time.
  3. A lack of self-confidence.
  4. Aversion to conflict and an unwillingness to participate in lengthy edit wars.
  5. Belief that their contributions are too likely to be reverted or deleted.
  6. Some find its overall atmosphere misogynistic.
  7. Wikipedia culture is sexual in ways they find off-putting.
  8. Being addressed as male is off-putting to women whose primary language has grammatical gender.
  9. Fewer opportunities for social relationships and a welcoming tone compared to other sites.

  Well, all righty then. Bryan comments:

  Conspicuously absent from the list of possible causes is the default explanation, also known as the “obvious explanation” and the “common-sense explanation.” Namely: On average, men enjoy editing Wikipedia much more than women do. While the vast majority of both genders would find editing Wikipedia boring, the small minority of males who like creating and correcting articles on technical topics for free vastly outnumbers the even smaller minority of women who like creating and correcting articles on technical topics for free.

  The only time the article even mentions the default explanation is not in the Causes sections, but way down in “Reactions,” when it allows Heather Mac Donald to state the default explanation without further commentary:

  The most straightforward explanation for the differing rates of participation in Wikipedia—and the one that conforms to everyday experience—is that, on average, males and females have different interests and preferred ways of spending their free time.

  What makes all this fascinating at the meta-level? Well, riddle me this: When you’re writing an encyclopedia article on X, why on Earth would you virtually fail to even mention the default explanation for X? Even if the default explanation happens to be wrong, you would expect authors to clearly state, “The default explanation, surprisingly, turns out to be wrong. Here’s why.”

  So what’s going on? Getting meta, there is a default explanation for the failure to mention something’s default explanation. Namely: Fear. Since the default explanation is what immediately comes to mind, people naturally blurt it out. Unless, of course, they bite their tongues lest they get their heads bitten off.

  Well, that's a huge excerpt. I'll also stick in this pearl: "[I]f we don’t default to the default, that’s strong evidence in favor of the default."

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• Just correcting the record. Saule Omarova was Biden's doomed nominee to be Comptroller of the Currency. She finally withdrew her name from consideration when some Senate Democrats got cold feet. But what was the real reason? David Harsanyi says nay to the MSM narrative: Omarova's Soviet Birth Is Not What Sunk Her Nomination.

  Republicans could do absolutely nothing to stop Joe Biden’s nominee other than highlight her extremism and hope that public pressure would do the trick.

  It did. Now, you wouldn’t know any of this if you were simply perusing the news this morning. NPR claimed in a tweet that Omarova withdrew her nomination “after facing personal attacks about being born in the former Soviet Union.” The New York Times says that “lobbyists and Republicans painted her as a communist because she was born in the Soviet Union.”

  These are lies. And neither outlet provides a single quote to back the assertion that Senate Republicans had personally attacked the Cornell professor over being “born in the Soviet Union.” Perhaps some of this confusion hinges on the fact that many in the media have tried to create the impression that Omarova is some kind of political refugee who escaped Soviet tyranny to come to the United States. That too was untrue, as it was happenstance that the exchange student found herself stranded in Wisconsin when the Soviet Union fell. She never defected.

  Fun Fact: Saule's sole movie credit is appearing as herself in a documentary titled Assholes: A Theory. I'm sure a little research could reveal whether she's one of the title's referents. But I have not done that research.