Category Archives: Politics

Ask a philosopher why you should vote

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… and, if that philosopher is Brian Weatherson, you’ll get a detailed consideration of cost, benefits, and rational strategies like this one:

Voting is a lot like playing an n-player Prisoners Dilemma with the other people who (loosely speaking) share the values that underlie your vote. I’m taking values to be defined loosely enough here that it includes most people who vote the same way you do. You’d prefer that all of you vote to all of you not voting. Given turnout rates in the U.S., that’s pretty much always the difference between winning and losing. But conditional on what the other people will almost certainly do, you’d prefer to not vote than to vote. And so would everyone else.

Of course, our electoral version of the game has more than one turn, which makes a difference to the winning strategy.
It’s a lovely post. I encourage you to print it out and tuck it in your pocket before you head out to the polling place. It will provide you with something worthwhile to read as you stand in line, and it may even be good fodder for conversation with your fellow prisoners there.

Electoral math.

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I’ve been thinking about the Electoral College, that mechanism by which voters in the U.S. indirectly elect their president. More precisely, I’ve been wondering whether small modifications in the system might make a significant difference.
When the polls close on Tuesday night and the votes are tallied, the next President of the United States will not be chosen on the basis of which candidate received the most votes cast. Rather, each state (and the District of Columbia) will tally its votes, and whoever wins within each state (or the District) gets all of its electoral votes.
Except for Maine and Nebraska, which I’ll get to in just a moment.

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Schwarzenegger signs Researcher Protection Act of 2008.

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The past couple years in California have been scary ones for academic researchers who conduct research with animals (as well as for their neighbors), what with firebombs, home invasions, significant intentional damage to their properties and threats to their safety.
In response to a ratcheting up of attacks from animals rights groups, universities have lobbied for the Researcher Protection Act of 2008, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law on September 28.

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Argumentation: FAIL.

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One of the big things philosopher-types like to do with their students is work on extracting arguments from a piece of text and reconstructing them. This can be useful in locating sources of disagreement, whether they be specific premises or inferences.
But some chunks of text that seem like they ought to have arguments that can be extracted and reconstructed end up being … opaque.
For example, this question and answer between Katie Couric and Sarah Palin (transcript by way of Shakesville):

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Gimme the money — hold the oversight.

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From time to time on this blog, we discuss the obligation scientists assume by virtue of accepting public money to fund their research. These obligations may include sharing knowledge with the public (since public money helped make that knowledge). And they also include playing by the public’s rules as enshrined in various federal regulations concerning scientific research.
If a scientist takes public money, she expects there will be some public oversight. That’s just how it goes.
Of course, working from this mindset makes it much harder for me to fathom how someone (say a Secretary of the Treasury) could ask for a big chunk of public money (say $700 billion) with no oversight whatsoever. Indeed, in trying to make sense of such a request, I find myself entertaining some pretty odd hypotheses:

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Retired congresscritter offers communication tips to scientists.

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The congresscritter in question being Sherwood Boehlert, who represented New York’s 24th Congressional district (1983-2007), and chaired the House Science Committee (2001-2007). Boehlert offers this advice in a video called “Speaking for Science: Bringing Your Message to Policymakers,” available for download from the American Chemical Society website.*
The video presents two scenarios in which a group of scientists meets with their Congressional representative (who happens to be a member of the House Science Committee, played by Boehlert). As you might guess, the idea is to contrast the effective meeting with the disastrous one.

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Science Debate 2008: It’s not the candidates’ answers that leave me cold

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… but the questions that they were answering!
Regular readers will know (from these posts, among others) that I think the extent to which presidential candidates have gotten right with science (or with reliable advisers on same) is important information for voters to have.
Indeed, I was hoping to get some nourishing information (building an informed electorate and healthy democracy with 12 vitamins and minerals!) when I checked out Obama’s and McCain’s answers to the Science Debate 2008 questions. And, while it is possible to glean information about McCain’s and Obama’s attitudes toward science and its role in the public sphere from these answers, there was rather less straight talk than I had hoped.
The reason for that, I think, has a lot to do with the 14 questions actually put before the candidates — questions, Michael Eisen points out, that sidestep the science-y heart of the matter for all-too-familiar political territory:

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They will know we’re people of reason by our …

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I have misgivings about wading into Crackergate — indeed, even about dipping my toe into the edge of the pool (which is all I’m promising here) — but here goes.
First, let me commend the thoughtful posts by Mark Chu-Carroll and John Wilkins on the issue. If you haven’t read them yet, read them now. (If you’ve already read them, read them again.)
Next, let me set forth the disclaimers that I’d hope would be obvious:

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Book review: And the Band Played On.

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Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. St. Martin’s Press, 1987.
There are a few books on my shelf that I can read any given number of times without being bored or impatient. One of these is And the Band Played On, a painstaking work of journalism that never feels laborious in the reading — despite being in excess of 600 pages.
Randy Shilts, who was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle reporting on AIDS in the early 1980s, assembled an intricate chronological telling of the early unfolding of the AIDS epidemic, from the first glimmerings of awareness of a new disease among doctors, public health workers, and trackers of epidemics, to the reactions of people in communities hit by this new disease (especially the gay communities in New York City and San Francisco), to the responses of politicians and policy makers who, almost without exception, dropped the ball.

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Connections.

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Because it strikes me as somehow related to my last post, and because Memorial Day is the Monday after next, I’m recycling a post I wrote last year for WAAGNFNP:
On Memorial Day, because I really needed to do something beside grade papers for awhile, I decided to go to the nursery to buy some plants. First, though, because the kids (who had the day off from school) were actually entertaining themselves pretty well, I poured myself another coffee and decided to actually read some of the articles in The Nation issue on climate change.

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