The Enlightened Despot

What with never writing anything here and all, I haven’t posted this yet, though it’s a few weeks old now. But it is glorious, and deserves recognition.

Jonah Lehrer has a splendid piece in the New Yorker about self control. In the 60s, psychologist Walter Mischel gave four year olds a choice: one marshmallow now, or two marshmallows in a few minutes. Decades later, he looked at how these children had done in school and life. It turns out that the ability to hold out for two marshmallows as a four year old is a better predictor of academic performance than IQ.

I want to follow up Akhbar’s recent spurt of thoughtful, finely written political commentary with a picture someone else took of their vacuum cleaner. First, the explanation:

I set up a photo camera in my room, turned out all the lights and took a long-exposure shot of my roomba doing it’s thing for about 30 minutes. The result is a picture that shows the path of the roomba through it’s cleaning cycle, it looks like a flight map or something.

Now, the picture:

While I am not nearly so crazy as Akhbar, I also have points of agreement with the right. One such is my unblinking hatred of teachers’ unions. Today at the American Scene Conor Friedersdorf links to this piece in the Los Angeles Times about how hard it is to fire a teacher in California. It made me deranged with anger.

Apparently, when a teacher is fired in California she has the right to an appeal heard by a commission of representatives from the union. Their decisions are shocking if unsurprising:

In many instances, an apology — or at least an acknowledgment of error — went a long way.

One teacher and coach from the San Ramon Valley Unified School District in the Bay Area was contrite after being accused of leering at teenage swimmers, making sexually charged remarks to students and instructing girls to “bark like seals” while they did push-ups.

“There is good reason to believe the respondent’s conduct will not recur,” the commission wrote of the teacher, who had worked in the district for 24 years.

Indeed. There are other horror cases of the unsacked: the teacher who encouraged his student to try harder the next time he attempted suicide, the teacher who got drunk on a class trip and groped a student, etc. etc. More demoralizing is that in a place where principals can’t fire a teacher who makes his girl students bark like seals, it’s impossible to fire a teacher simply for being bad at teaching. There is an awful story about a principal who spends an entire year documenting an obvious incompetent, only to rebuffed by the commission. Read the whole thing.

From McSweeney’s, jokes for people with body image problems tied to low self-esteem.

Q: What has two arms, two legs, and a weight more or less proportional to its height?

A: Absolutely fucking nothing.

Pro golfer Padraig Harrington tests out Happy Gilmore’s running swing and improves his drive by 30 yards, though his accuracy suffers. Fantastic.

(h/t Kottke)

You’ll often hear that soap saves as many lives as penicillin, though I’ve never seen the proof. In a similar vein, I’d argue that automatic rifles, of which the AK-47 is the exemplar, have changed the world as much as the nuclear bomb.

Automatic rifles make killing easy, and the AK-47 makes it easier than any other rifle. Most of its awful virtues derive from the loose fit of its component parts: parts are interchangeable between weapons, so repair is simple; dirt and rust can accumulate without causing the weapon to jam, so maintenance is unnecessary; the weapon is not precisely machined, so the weapon is cheap. None of these things is true of the M16, NATO’s rifle, which requires a relatively skilled operator and costs several times as much in most markets.

The AK-47 makes mass killing available to the masses. In a country with a weak central government a small band of untrained boys with AK-47s can destroy a village in a single hectic afternoon - something that would be impossible with swords, spears, or muskets - and much harder with an M16. You could do the same in America, but you could not escape the reprisal. In a poorer, less navigable country the military’s response would be slower and less coordinated and your band could escape. This is what happens daily in countries like the Congo or even Pakistan. Without the AK-47, it would not be possible.

Twitter is a fad. Two years from now, there will be fewer tweets per person per day in America than there are today. Prediction. I just made it.

Because in 2016, she will no longer be hot.

Mark Liberman has a beautiful side by side of passages from David Brooks (today) and David Hume (three centuries ago, and better reasoned). The upshot: the ‘novel’ problems of science and morality Brooks raises are not novel at all.

David Brooks:

Socrates talked. The assumption behind his approach to philosophy, and the approaches of millions of people since, is that moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation […]

Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. […]

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain.

David Hume:

There has been a controversy started of late, much better worth examination, concerning the general foundation of MORALS; whether they be derived from REASON, or from SENTIMENT; whether we attain the knowledge of them by a chain of argument and induction, or by an immediate feeling and finer internal sense; whether, like all sound judgment of truth and falsehood, they should be the same to every rational intelligent being; or whether, like the perception of beauty and deformity, they be founded entirely on the particular fabric and constitution of the human species.

The ancient philosophers, though they often affirm, that virtue is nothing but conformity to reason, yet, in general, seem to consider morals as deriving their existence from taste and sentiment.

Two great quotes from the halls of Congress. First, Marc Ambinder reports this ripping exchange from a Senate Budget Committee:

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND): Oh, you are good.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA): Your wife said the same thing.

I now like Chuck Grassley 23% more than I did. Second, Matty ‘the YZA’ Yglesias points us to a gem from Rep John Shimkus (R):

SHIMKUS: It’s plant food … So if we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere? … So all our good intentions could be for naught. In fact, we could be doing just the opposite of what the people who want to save the world are saying.

On our short blogroll you’ll notice that we have both The Corner and The Daily Kos under the heading ‘influential lunatics’. This is our ever so droll way of expressing our feelings about partisan thought. But it must be said that the Daily Kos is better than the Corner at criticizing its own. To be sure, both sites are quick to make scurrilous attacks on those from their own side with insufficient ideological purity (Limbaugh critics and John McCain, the DLC and Evan Bayh) - but the Daily Kos has done well in scorning corrupt Democrats. To wit, Roland Burris.

Another tool for tracking interest in various topics: Wikirank, which tracks hits on Wikipedia entries. Not entirely dissimilar from our blog’s activity is the chart for the article on Enlightened Despot (actually, Enlightened Despot redirects to Enlightened Absolutism on Wikipedia).

(h/t Likecool)

I am reluctant to quarrel with Akhbar, one of the most correct men I know. But I must respond to this:

The bigger issue, though, is that this marijuana-centric outrage is complete bullshit. If you want pot legalized because you think it’s harmless and you enjoy smoking it, then knock yourself out. But once you bring up tax revenues, personal freedom, or the evils of the drug war, you really owe an explanation for why you’re focusing on marijuana. And while I’d love to hear it, I doubt that explanation would be very convincing.

I would focus on marijuana, for what I think is the very convincing reason of humility. It’s a certainty that legalizing drugs would have both good and bad effects; what’s uncertain is the exact nature, ratio, and pattern of those effects. It’s also certain that the effects, both good and bad, of legalizing cocaine would be more dramatic than those of legalizing marijuana. Why not then legalize marijuana first and observe the results? Then, after a time of say ten years, we can decide whether we want to legalize cocaine; assuming we do, we’ll know better what to expect and be able to legalize the other drugs in a more elegant way, maximizing the good and minimizing the bad.