Building a Better Table (/Voting System)

In my last post, I explained why trying to make a third party work in the current American electoral system is like trying to make a functional table that stands on one spindly leg -- it's not improbable, it's effectively futile.

In this post, I provide a catalogue of the current contenders for best Vastly Superior Table Design.

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Under Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV), aka Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV), aka Alternative Voting (AV), instead of picking a candidate, you pick a little list of your favorites. You keep going until you don't know who these people are or you don't care. If your first-choice candidate gets the fewest first-place votes, they get magically lopped off your list, and everybody else moves up a spot. Now your #2 choice is your #1 choice. Repeat. But, thanks to technology™, we can do this all at once now -- we take everybody's ballots, and we tally up the first-choice votes, we eliminate a candidate, and we check to see who the new first-choice "loser" is. Eventually there are two people left (or somebody gets >50% of the vote), and the winner of that standoff wins. This person tends to be the candidate most people are broadly okay with.

Why does this work better? You don't have to lie. You can vote for whatever nutjob or savior you want, and when they lose, your vote isn't wasted -- it still counts. That's why RCV, unlike FPTP, is a "transferable-vote" system.

Is it perfect? No.

• It'd be tough to implement on the current generation of voting machines, so we'd need new ones (though we'll need some eventually anyway, so what the heck).
• You can't really do regional tallies, because you have to have everybody's votes in before you start the runoff. Otherwise, relatively small differences in votes can cause snowball effects.
• Ties are pretty common early on while there are still a lot of candidates -- you have to eliminate somebody every round, and when all the randos are "tied" at close to zero, it can be kind of a headache to sort through (especially since we already know that none of them is likely to win). Although, using a % cutoff in the first round can quickly sort the wheat from the chaff. See e.g. this awesome visualization of the recent Minneapolis mayoral contest!
• It's hard to see what's happening from the outside -- there are ballots, then Math occurs, and then it spits out a winner. Though as the link above demonstrates, it's pretty digestible after the fact.

BUT. Can it sustain third parties? Can it offer people real choice?

YES! Well, in the long run there will still tend to be two dominant parties, but which ones they are may change, the other parties can genuinely compete for top billing, and nobody has to hold their nose at the ballot box EVER AGAIN.

Oh, also: if the GOP Primary were RCV, Trump would not be the nominee. But hey, NBD...

Is this some hippy-dippy political science pipe dream?

NO. There is an organization called FairVote.org that is making huge strides. A number of American cities already use it, there are were several (successful!) ballot initiatives LAST NOVEMBER to use it at the state level to elect legislators and governors, and Australia has already been using it for a while now. We only haven't heard about it because we have our heads up our asses trying really hard to make a super tall table with crappy parts.

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Under Range Voting, aka Score Voting, you say how much you like each candidate. It's Yelp, it's Amazon, it's Olympic gymnastics. That's literally it, that's the whole thing. We could use zero to five "stars," or a scale of one to ten, it doesn't really matter. This means it's not "first-past-the-post" either -- you don't win once you reach a large enough number of votes, you win by pleasing enough people.

Can this sustain third parties? Obviously. If everybody in the country agrees the "top two" candidates are not actually that great, they lose. It's the ultimate level playing field. Because you've used Yelp and Amazon, you get how this works. Sometime the big name brands make a crappy product, some scrappy mid-tier contender puts together a winner, and voila.

But ALSO because you've used Yelp & Amazon, you also know the slight pitfall here. People with agendas can really influence the vote -- all those crappy one-star reviews by the idiots who didn't pay attention to what they're ordering, or worse, sponsor competing products? Their votes still get averaged in. RCV avoids this problem because you can't spike the ball on people you hate (or even mildly dislike), you can only rank them lower.

Does that mean the system is broken? No. It's still better than just asking "meh, what's popular?" It's just that on its worst day, it ends up performing similarly to what we have now.

Moreover, unlike RCV, it'd be a snap to implement on current voting machines; you CAN do regional tallies; ties don't matter unless they're near the top; and it's really obvious what's happening. You can easily sort through ballots by hand if you want, and just take the averages.

So, pluses and minuses relative to RCV. But still better than our current system pretty much any day of the week. Is *this* a political science pipe dream? Well, kind of. There are very, very smart people who would take this over RCV -- see rangevoting.org -- but not really a committed ground game at the moment. Still, spread the word, and we'll see what people think.


One footnote: how do we deal with people you don't have an opinion on? Leave it blank. Only take the average of actual scores for a candidate. Wait, wouldn't that mean some random UFO enthusiast with 1000 fans could just come in at the end and win?!? Yeah, you'd probably have to restrict the final vote to like the top five or ten candidates. But right up until election day, leave 'em in -- as soon as the UFO guy randomly wins a poll, everybody will be like "who's that? OH." And, if the people decide he's crazy, he will never harass the polls again.

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Under Approval Voting, you say "I do/do not like this person" for each candidate. It's basically just Range voting, but with a scale of zero or one, instead of one to ten. It's the Rotten Tomatoes to Range Voting's IMDB. (Alternatively, you can think of it as: you can vote for as many people as you want, and the person with the most votes by all voters wins.)

That means you can't express as much information about your preferences, but it's also less sensitive to extreme opinions. If you're like me, and you hate to pretend things are black and white, this makes you very mad, but if you worry a lot about the system getting hijacked -- if, for example, it turned out one political faction tended to vote ten for their candidate and one for everybody else, while another used the full scale -- then Approval is a little less risky.

Even easier to implement than Range; still levels the playing field tremendously; means races will be closer, and voters won't get to say as much about their preferences. But a solid choice, and again, still vastly superior to the current system.

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There you have it, folks. If you're truly a Gary Johnson or Jill Stein fan, or think further outside the box; or if you hate Hillary and Donald, whether or not you can pick one; or if you just think we can maybe stop pretending the whole US is two perfectly, fundamentally opposed groups of people for one goddamn minute so we can think straight and accomplish things, then get on board the screw-this-table train and get involved.


Probably the shortest path to this is signing up to volunteer with FairVote, but Range is great too; in any case share, discuss, do what your heart tells you. That's the whole point!

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PS - if you want the ULTIMATE POWER MEGAZORD METHOD that has the fewest concessions to bad math, and don't mind if it's a little complicated, say hello to your friend Condorcet Voting! This is actually a criterion rather than a method per se, but there are two most common versions, I think: one that's like RCV but asks you to rate both your top and bottom candidates, and one that requires the voter to rate each head-to-head combination of candidates running. You can see why these are... less likely to catch on, despite being pretty bomb-proof mathematically. (Probably don't muddy the waters by lobbying for this right now, thanks.)

PPS - ...Did I mention with RCV primaries, Trump wouldn't be the nominee, to the relief of most Republicans and everyone else?

(Also, did I mention there was a candidate trying to get into the Dem debates last fall who had FairVote's system on his platform [cf. footnote]? Did I call this jazz coming? Not that I'm bitter or anything... Oh Lessig. <3)

American 3rd parties don't fail because of cynicism. They fail *because math.*

A pole is not a table.

You want to build the tallest, most beautiful house of cards in the world. But all you have to build on is a short, squat table that's falling apart. You decide you won't stand for this any longer. You want to go big.

You effortlessly pluck off the four barely-attached legs of your table, stack them on top of one another end-to-end, and place the tabletop on the highest leg, gloriously towering in the air.

For a moment, you have a higher surface on which to build a tall, beautiful house of cards. And then, quite obviously... you don't. It all comes crashing down, and once again you have a crappy pseudo-table piled on your kitchen floor.

Why didn't this work? It was taller, it was made from the same raw materials, and it had the same basic idea -- put a tabletop on some legs so it's elevated. Shoulda been fine!

Clearly, it didn't work because it's not stable. Gravity pulled the thing down, and it inevitably fell back to its original position (or a crappy version of it, anyway).

A pole is not a table, for any reasonable definition of either. They are Different Things. This is not a mere problem of engineering -- no combination of nails, screws, etc., can take four (spindly) legs and a tabletop and make a pole-table that will stand taller than the original product for any functional length of time. All you can do, if you believe yours is the only table-wood available, is refurbish the current mess so it doesn't break so easily.

Building a pole that is taller and better is not improbable. It is not a matter of *convincing* your unimaginative, table-raised house-of-cards buddies that it is superior. It is effectively impossible. It will not work.

If you want a better, taller table, you need to build one.

"See? We just needed to eliminate the Superdelegates. It's fixed!"
(photo from Hubush)

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This is why we can't have nice things third parties right now. We're working with a shoddy old table, and we're pretending we can improve it by just rearranging it.

For federal elections in the United States, we have a first-past-the-post (FPTP), winner-take-all, non-transferable voting system. In this system, you only get to vote for one person for each position; if you vote for your favorite and they lose, you don't get to vote again; and the person with the most votes wins. (That is, the first to gain a plurality -- hence, first-past-the-post.) In this system, there is no prize for second place, and there is equally no prize for third, fourth, or fifth place. Everyone casts their vote at once, so everybody has to vote bearing in mind what they believe everybody else will do. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but I am being *very specific* about what we have, because it's far from the only way we could do things. (Psst -- there is a craft and hardware store down the street that sells wood for tables. We will pay it a visit in a moment.)

In the classic example, if there are three candidates, Alice, Bob, and Chuck, and 60% of people think both Alice and Bob are far better than Chuck, but fail to agree on which is the "most" better, we get Chuck. (This is literally what happened in the Republican Primary.) Most of the time voters understand this, and eventually have to form an agreement between Alice and Bob to get the best chance of beating Chuck. This means voters, in order to avoid electing somebody a majority do not want, have to essentially "lie" about their first choice. But the more candidates there are, the more likely it is things will go very sideways, because coordinating mass action in that competitive an environment is really hard. A majority of Republican primary voters preferred every other candidate to Trump, but didn't get their act together in time to boot him out. Now we find ourselves here.

Why does this usually boil down to the lesser of *two* evils? Simple -- as the GOP Primary proved, this situation is very unstable. Every vote is "stolen" from some other candidate, i.e. that voter's second-choice candidate. The more votes a (long-shot) candidate gets, then unless they steal votes equally from every other candidate, they're hurting one competitor and helping another -- and moreover, for most voters, the candidate getting most screwed is the (viable) one with the most similar views to their own!

This is called the "spoiler" effect, or more recently, the "Nader" effect. So, two political parties inevitably emerge and jockey to win by 51-49, or thereabouts, and third parties aren't really sustainable. As soon as there is a third party that's really, really good, it will immediately murder both itself and its closest ideological competitor in the election (thus ensuring the catastrophic short-term failure of its policy goals), and then next time around, maybe become the new "second" top-tier party. We will once again be left with two "evils" to choose from -- they may be slightly rearranged, but there will be two of them. That is all that can ever happen.

As our pole-table would tell us, gravity is a b**ch.

Now let's just take a trip down to the hardware store and see what other kinds of tables there are.

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Very briefly, there are perhaps three top contenders for Vastly Superior Table Design, all of which would absolutely crush the crappy status quo. They are:

• Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV). (Also sometimes called Alternative Voting, as in the linked video, or Instant Runoff, as in the FairVote link on the GOP primary.) List candidates in order of preference. If your top choice receives the fewest #1 votes, they're eliminated, and your second choice becomes your new first choice. "New" votes are tallied; repeat until somebody wins.
• Range Voting. Rate candidates on a scale of 1-10, highest average score wins. ("Yelp/IMDB-style")
• Approval Voting. Thumbs up or down for each candidate, most-approved wins. ("Rotten Tomatoes-style")

See how easy that was? See how obviously better they all are, because you don't have to "lie" about your top choice to keep your vote from being wasted?!? Oy.

And they're not just pipe dreams, either. RCV is furthest along: it's already used for elections in many American cities, is on the ballot *this November* to be used for some state elections, and has been used in Australia... since 1918.

(For more information, go to FairVote.org RIGHT NOW. Or just browse the Wikipedia page.)

Let's just pick a table and build it. There are trade-offs for each, but we can't lose by switching from the pile of splinters we have now.

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In my next post, I'll provide a little more gory detail for the interested. If you only read this one and leave saying, "It's not only useless, but BAD, to vote third-party in federal races until we change how we vote, and that could *realistically* occur in the near future if I take action!" then I have accomplished my goal. If you want to be the cool kid who already has a position staked out on which Vastly Superior Table we should switch to, so you can tell your kids you were a hipster voter, then by all means stay tuned.

PS -- thanks to my awesome science friends Tory, Erin, and Jess for putting me up to this post. It's been a long time coming, but I wouldn't have gotten around to it if not for them!

PPS -- exceptions:

• This doesn't necessarily apply in local, and some state, elections.
• Voting 3p at the federal level in a non-swing state might be fine, but just remember that you're relying on the strategic voting of others: if everybody who wanted to vote like you scratched the itch, you'd all screw each other over.
• If you are absolutely, positively against everything either major party stands for, I get where you're coming from. But you are still reducing your "electoral" voice by not picking. Either way, you actually stand to benefit the MOST by advocating for electoral reforms, because you would plausibly get real representation for the first time. Make some noise!

Wonderful Swedes, Workable Science

If y'all haven't already discovered The Weeds, Vox's policy podcast, OMG you don't know what you're missing. It's like the antidote to the vitriol and despair of American politics: detail-oriented discussion of nuts-and-bolts policy on the level of people who actually do that work. While Trump and Clinton and Sanders exchange body blows, the business of governing quietly carries on in Federal, state, and municipal offices around the country, and it's reassuring to remember that and learn what the cutting-edge ideas are in how best to advance that business.

In their May 27, 2016 episode, they discuss a shiny new paper using the near-omniscience of Swedish administrative data to estimate the effects of psychological trauma during pregnancy on the mental health of the child when they reach adulthood. It's cool. But in the most recent episode from June 3 (middle show segment), they note that the paper in question has been called out for failing to acknowledge its intellectual forebears, possibly in an effort to appear more novel than it actually is. Matt Yglesias and Sarah Kliff then capably recap some of the key questions in the replicability crisis that's kept the scientific community up nights lately. And that means that for a hot minute this became a science policy podcast, which of course got me all heebly-jeebly.

They do a great job of explaining, to a policy audience probably not as obsessed with this crisis as sciency types have been, how incentives to publish ever more novel and controversial findings may have rendered suspect a considerable chunk of research in the last few decades. I'm super glad for that, and am totally stealing Sarah's "hot take machine for the academy" line. However, one important thing they don't touch on is the good reasons the system came to look like this in the first place.

What we fear when we talk about the value of original research is not replication; it's duplication. Not so much in the sense of fraud or plagiarism, though those are certainly undesirable, but rather in the sense of research on a treadmill, wherein a failure to learn the history of one's field leads to wasted time and energy reinventing the wheel. I get the sense that this is one area where scholarly work is genuinely better than most opinion journalism, even the data-driven variety: if you usually have to cite 100 other papers to publish an article, there will typically not be a gigantic surplus of articles on a subject (and yet even despite that, it feels like that sometimes), and you will probably not miss giant chunks of important information, all of which leads to efficiency and centralization in the field.

As an exercise in contrast, consider this article from the right-wing blog Zero Hedge. It's a retort to a WaPo "fact check" of a collage of charts ZH posted (you follow that?). While obviously more low-brow in tone and aim, this is pretty similar to the kinds of substantive exchanges you see in academia all the time. The difference is these articles were not, of course, subject to peer review; not carefully scrutinized for evidence of bias in presentation (though that is in part what the debate is about); not held to exacting disciplinary standards for analytical methods (though both maintain they do, at least for the standards within their own spheres of influence); and thus, able to be published within days of each other. I do give more credence to the fact-checking article, and I don't mean to draw false equivalence -- only to point out that when there isn't sufficient emphasis on drawing from a base of common knowledge, you can always throw charts at each other and most readers will just believe whichever one sounds the best to them. Thousands of such feuds erupt all over the internet all the time, and most of them ultimately produce nothing but heat, and a sense of tribal superiority. The emphasis in academia that you can't just go make stuff up without looking at what everybody else in your field has done tends to minimize the flash-in-the-pan aspects of these debates, so even though they take longer, they do tend to resolve in one direction or another -- at least for a while.

In the Vox example, it's true that Matt only saw the article because of the new publication and its presentation on NBER. However, that didn't have to be the case: if NBER runs a feature on seminal papers from the past alongside the freshest work, for instance, it accomplishes much the same thing in terms of disseminating useful knowledge, without present-day authors becoming incentivized to angle for a moment in the spotlight, prior literature notwithstanding. The website would, in a sense, better resemble the sort of didactic structure of the academy: know the oldies & goodies as well as the new hot stuff in somewhat equal measure, so we're all working from the same base of knowledge and can speak a common tongue.

So originality and lit review, which are significant factors in the novelty-controversy maelstrom, are still definitely worth maintaining even as we figure out how to best incentivize replication, data-sharing, open-access publishing, all that sort of stuff; and professional organizations & science journalists can help in advancing the cause too, perhaps by adopting some of the healthier norms of the academy while rejecting the less healthy ones. I'm 1000% in favor of staid replication, but it's good to remember what else we want to maintain at the same time.

TL;DR: science's historical emphasis on original work requires people to understand the prior literature, so we don't lose knowledge as fast as we generate it. It just also has the side effect of overvaluing novelty. We should fix that, but we shouldn't conflate ignorance or plagiarism with hot-takeism; they're two separate problems and require different solutions!



Also, note: another post about how to be a skeptical reader of science journalism in the right ways, not the wrong ways. Stay tuned!

Lifehacks! (All the cool kids are doing it, etc.)

Okay, but in all seriousness...

My friend Tracey asked if neuro people knew cool magic tricks and stuff. We do! But that also reminded me that we know some cool tricks that are actually USEFUL, and can make a big difference in everyday life.

These are some simple, cheap, loosely neuroscience/psychology-inspired "lifehacks" I personally use all the time, mostly focused on getting into habits that reduce cognitive overhead and promote good circadian rhythm. These legit took me like... 5 years of trial and error (and the influence of a very methodical girlfriend) to get ANY good at, so don't feel like you're doing it all wrong if either you haven't heard of them, feel they don't work for you, or you've tried and failed to implement something similar. Just keep giving yourself rewards for seeing what works for you and getting it right... good habits tend to build on each other, so it also becomes easier as you go!

Also I am naturally like, the worst-habited person on earth, so if I can do it, by Jesus you can too.

Ordered in how they affect my day:

1. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I avoid ANY exposure to bright (especially blue-tinged) light, since even a flash can mess with the photoreceptors that help your circadian clock know what time it is. No reason to fast forward to "it's sunrise!" at 3:30 AM. (Guys, get to know your bathroom layout VERY well before you try this...)

2. I get up in the morning with stuff next to bed, including a healthy amount of caffeine (I use caffeinated variants of Mio in a water bottle, since I'm not into coffee, it doesn't require prep time, and it's cheap) and my brightly-lit phone, that help me lower the threshold of resistance for getting up and starting the string of habits that eventually lead me out the door without thinking too hard, because the next thing is what I automatically do.

3. I make a specific effort to squeeze some cardio in -- in my case by biking to work -- as it's pretty well-associated with things like positive mental health outcomes, adult neurogenesis (which is probably related), and the rest of the obvious benefits. Plus biking saves gas money. This one took me the better part of a year to get the hang of, though! (If interested, here's a one-stop knowledge base.)

4. When I hit the gym, I go before work because I find it more habit-sustainable (avoiding "but I'm tired and there's Netflix at home" after work), though technically due to things like hormone fluctuation controlled by circadian rhythm, most people actually gain more muscle mass for the same exercise if they work out in the afternoon. If my gym were near my work, I'd probably try to go around then, but this works alright.

5. On most days I do big multi-muscle group exercises like squats or deadlifts first, as that's believed to recruit more sympathetic neural activation and stimulate the greatest release of muscle growth-promoting hormones (cf. this article, §2.3); this effectively gives any exercises you do afterward a big boost in effectiveness.

6. When at work, I use apps like Self-Control to reduce my ability to slack off, using the same kind of logic where Odysseus had himself tied to the mast BEFORE they got to the sirens. I also have alarms at the end of the workday reminding me to turn it on at my work computer for the next 24-hour period, and at bedtime to turn it on for my personal laptop. NEVER TRUST FUTURE YOU, FUTURE YOU IS WEAK AND EVIL.

7. I also use a blue-wavelength light, since my office doesn't have a window for sunlight, to help keep my circadian rhythm up. This is basically the exact opposite of #1. Also may help keep the winter blues at bay if you're susceptible.

8. Your REM cycle is usually kinda like 90 minutes, and it usually takes you about 30 minutes to enter deep sleep (aka slow-wave sleep, or SWS, because of how your neurons sync up when measured by EEG). So I only take naps that are <30m, and thus little "refreshers" (alarms obviously help here), or >90m, which are like "rechargers," if I'm really beat and have a lot more to do that day. If you've woken up from a nap and just been a complete zombie for a couple hours, you probably came to in that 30-90m range where you're in SWS and your brain is busy consolidating learning. It is NOT ready to get woken up by your tomfoolery, it's doing important stuff and doesn't want to be interrupted.

9. I also try hard to avoid taking naps later than about 2pm. There are two systems that control sleep drive: Process C (for Circadian), and Process S (for homeoStatic, which is based on how much neural "fuel" you've used up). The two basically sum to tell you how tired you are. Process S, in particular, sort of knows how long it's been since you last slept, so if you nap at 5, it resets and you only have like half the sleepiness you'd normally have by bedtime. (See various links above.)

10. I mentioned earlier I have caffeine first thing in the morning. For obvious reasons, I avoid having it after dinner, as it's still affecting your system about 6-9 hours later. What's less obvious is that, while you don't want to become a caffeine addict, it's totally justified to have a good amount throughout your morning! That's because caffeine works by suppressing the sensitivity of receptors that drive Process S -- in other words, it tells your brain "everything's FINE, we've got PLENTY of fuel left!" ...which of course may be a lie. But if your brain gets this big wallop in the evening of all that Process S buildup, aka spent metabolic fuel, hitting the receptors at once, you get a nice big urge to unwind. This helps keep your sleep drive nice and reliable.

11. Because I'm personally a pretty addictive personality, and I love video games, I have a sort of "safebox" system with my girlfriend. She keeps the games in a hidden place, and when I'd like to play, I ask her to get one for me. It may sound extreme, but I actually asked her to do this, because otherwise I make all kinds of excuses to play when I've really got shit to do. Also helps me remember how much fun one can have in... more like life-positive activities, basically.

12. Before bed, I try to abide by good "sleep hygiene." This means having a pattern of habits that lead you to bed, just like you have some that help you wake up; avoiding screens where possible, and using apps like f.lux and Twilight to filter blue light from your devices where not (these turn the screen kind of reddish, but get rid of most of the light in wavelengths that affect circadian photoreceptors); only hanging around in bed for sleep and, er, other stuff, so your body knows when it gets into bed it's probably bedtime; keeping backlit clocks out of sight so you don't wake up at 3:30 and get stressed cuz you're awake at 3:30; and getting up if I fail to fall asleep for like 20-30 min, so I keep my relationship with my bed trusty and healthy.

I'm sure there's more, but that's all I've got for now. Happy hacking!

Larry Lessig -- or, the Man Who Wouldn't Be President

In case you've heard murmurings but have found it all very academic, here's an explainer on the latest campaign to stir things up for the Presidential primaries.

Lawrence Lessig is a law professor famous for various exploits around things like Creative Commons and Net Neutrality. More recently, he founded the Mayday PAC, whose goal was basically to destroy all SuperPACs so as to decrease the influence of money in politics; he's done some well-received TED talks on all these topics. And much more recently, he's begun exploring the possibility of a run for President on the Democratic ticket, as the first "Referendum President."

In short, this means if elected, he would pass a single bill reforming campaign finance and electoral mechanics, then promptly resign and pass the Presidency to his Veep.

Lessig has political views, but more than that he is a tinkerer with systems. He sees the way games are played, sees that they're out of balance and causing all kinds of bad behavior, and tries to step in and set the rules straight so everybody can get back to playing the way the game was intended.

Because of my previously stated views on the bad equilibrium in American electoral politics, I support Lessig's run, which will not work. You read me correctly, he will not be elected "Referendum President," though many people will earnestly tell you it's possible. Don't believe them, but just go with it.

That is because "working" as thus far defined -- that is, being elected President -- is really secondary to "working" as it's actually intended, which is raising awareness around the issue and maybe laying the groundwork for actual policy change.

I was inspired to write this post by the IAmA Thread that Lessig and his exploratory committee chair, Wikipedia [co-]founder Jimmy Wales, did on Reddit. The main thing I wish to comment on is the (reasonable, but ultimately misguided) concerns voiced by the Redditors who pointed out that Lessig's stated plan, erm, wouldn't actually really work, probably.

What Lessig is attempting is basically a weighted Xanatos Gambit with some Batman Gambit thrown in. The victory condition he espouses, where he wins, passes the Citizens Equality Act, and steps down, is exceedingly unlikely, but ultimately unnecessary; what matters is the more likely outcome that stems from his declaring such a victory condition.

Lessig does not need to get elected. Frankly, I don't think Lessig expects, or even hopes, to get elected. I think Lessig just wants people talking about the issue seriously, and unfortunately, talking about the issue on its own (i.e., the Mayday PAC) has not produced required results, because it is too peripheral to the average American's political consciousness. Therefore, what has to happen for people to see the issue is for Lessig to run, and completely front his own candidacy around the issue.

The point is that the host of people in the thread asking about the legitimacy and plausibility of his plan being enacted once in office are doing what they believe is an important service, and it's not counterproductive really, but neither is it (likely to be) relevant.

This approach threads the game theoretic needle in order to arouse political will, and that's all it has to do to be the best available option at the moment. We can deal with the rest when we get there.


Some evidence is starting to accrue, aside from Lessig's increased name recognition (he's now on the polls), that the intended shift is occurring. Not only is Trump seen as a bizarro ally to the cause, but there is speculation to the effect that electoral reform will be a central issue in the campaign.
Job done, eh? Now we'll just see if they shoot the moon.


One footnote: if you're interested in what kinds of reform platforms would ACTUALLY, DIRECTLY result in the appropriate policy changes, check out Represent.Us, which has a more local and state, grassroots approach -- even though they're maybe a little more accusatory with their #Corruption rhetoric than Lessig's gentler "don't hate the player, hate the game" message. Disclaimer: the link used gets me points on a silly but effective incentives tree on the site. Whatever, don't judge me.

A second footnote: while I support his ideas about campaign finance, I'm more jazzed he's including Ranked-Choice Voting (AKA Alternative Voting, Instant-Runoff Voting, etc.). See Sir Red Squirrel for details.

A short, inexpert survey of scholarly work on police use of lethal force.

Source: NBC

The thing about Ferguson is... we are operating squarely within the confines of collective social and institutional memory. Trying to understand police use of force is complicated and difficult. I recommend to everyone that they review both the practices of Ferguson/St Louis County's PD's on their own merits, and the general guidelines on escalation-of-force protocols out there on the internet.

We still have a lot we don't know about the specifics in Michael Brown's death, though we all have our (widely varying) suspicions. We have more information about the Wallace shooting. But we don't know, so much as we feel, that these deaths must be understood in the context of broader trends in law enforcement and the sociological fabric of America. And that is extremely difficult to do, because many police departments and government entities don't appear interested in helping.

I have already spent a lot of Facebook real estate, on my own and others' walls, posting about Ferguson. I've talked with gun owners, police officers, social activists; country folk, city-dwellers; friends and strangers; liberals and conservatives; people of many colors. I've discussed the specifics of the Brown shooting, the relevance and impact of his purported robbery, the history of Ferguson PD, Wilson's background in a now-disbanded department, the feasibility or impossibility of non-lethal force in Wallace's death, the frequency and motivations of suicide-by-cop, and the broader challenges in combating racism in the American justice system -- the same stuff that hopefully all of us have been discussing and writing about.

I will therefore not go into that here. For the curious, suffice to say that, as a moderate social progressive, I think cops have it rough, but the black urban poor have it much rougher, and my empathy for officers runs smack into my belief that authority demands accountability. I also think the truth of the Brown incident probably lies in between the most extreme accounts, though where in between remains uncertain. But in a sense, the resolution of the Brown case shouldn't dominate a conversation about something this big. No one case can fully exemplify a national problem.

Because I think situations like this are always judgment calls in degrees, we can only really get a sense of what is and is not permissible, and desirable, in police behavior at a bird's-eye view. With that in mind, I present the following papers without comment. I did not collect them with a rhetorical goal in mind, and I have not even finished reading them myself. The only thing I'm confident they all had in common was they were written by scholars or analysts, and were subjected to peer review or solicited within the government. I just want to add something tangible to the conversation.

Note: hopefully some of these will be available to those who don't have access to University journal subscriptions. If nothing else, read the abstracts and skim the government-published pdf's. And of course, do your own research. After all, this isn't my area. I'm just trying to do what I can.

Jacobs D, Britt D (1979). Inequality and Police Use of Deadly Force: An Empirical Assessment of a Conflict Hypothesis. Social Problems 26(4).

http://www.jstor.org/stable/800504

Kaune MM, Tischler CA (1989). Liability in Police Use of Deadly Force. Am J Police 89.

http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/ajpol8&div=1&g_sent=1&collection=journals#2

National Criminal Justice Reference Service, National Institute of Justice: Use of Force by Police, Pt 2.

Garner JH, Maxwell CD. Ch 4, Measuring the Amount of Force Used By and Against the Police in Six Jurisdictions. 

Alpert GP, Dunham RG. Ch 5, The Force Factor: Measuring and Assessing Police Use of Force and Suspect Resistance.

Adams K. Ch 6, A Research Agenda on Police Use of Force.

http://sashley.com/filessentbysteve/resources/use%20of%20force%20by%20police%20-%201999%20(part%20two).pdf

Jacobs D, O’brien RM (1998). The Determinants of Deadly Force: A Structural Analysis of Police Violence. Am J Sociology 103(4).

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/231291

Fyfe JJ (2006). Police use of deadly force: Research and reform. Justice Quarterly 5(2).

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418828800089691#.U_zQ6bxdWnQ

Klinger DA, Brunson RK (2009). Police officers’ perceptual distortions during lethal force situations: Informing the reasonableness standard. Criminology & Public Policy 8(1).

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9133.2009.00537.x/abstract

Bennett RR (1997). Excessive force: A comparative study of police in the Caribbean. Justice Quarterly 14(4).

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418829700093541#.U_zQ_rxdWnQ

Walker S (2007). Police Accountability: Current Issues and Research Needs. Presented at NIJ Policing Res Workshop, Washington DC (2006).

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/218583.pdf

FutureArt: protected by policy? Free but impoverished? Can we have it both ways?

I consider myself a perennial noob on the subject of artistic intellectual property, so I'm soliciting reactions to this piece from Vox (ignore the up-front questionnaire if it please you).

Hatsune Miku, Pop Star of the People.
hoangtush @ deviantart

I honestly feel very conflicted. On the one hand, I am a huge believer in the power of decreasing supply costs to increase living standards, and the internet and its access to information and information-based services strikes me as a big deal. Resistance to the abundance of valuable services on behalf of its producers seems to me like a great way to entrench dying industries and inhibit progress; consider the replacement of auto manufacturing jobs with robots, and my argument in that kind of paradigm.

On the other hand, I really dislike the idea that valuable art, writing, music, etc., usually produced on small scales long before an artist catches on and often never reaching the profitability of some inferior work, would lose yet more financial leverage (as my grad-school colleague Erik Hoel shared).

One hope that i have is that the democratization of art production will spur the spotlighting of worthwhile artists; in a certain sense Biebs is the ultimate example of this, ironically enough, if only because as an overall package he was valuable to the market. Indie bands stand to benefit as well, and Arcade Fire's grammy isn't discouraging. Plus if it's true that personality, not product, is the marketable good, then the weird genius of Hatsune Miku at least changes the conversation, even if it's not clear how.

Another friend and former classmate, Jason Myatt, has kicked around an idea with me about a simple safety net that pays people to devote 20 hours a week to a demonstrated productive activity -- intentional pipe dream/thought experiment though it is from a current-implementation perspective -- to me suggests a possible solution. At least, it does so if only in the sense that, once global distribution of keep-you-alive supplies evens out and death by starvation/exposure could (if we chose) become a thing of the past, then the need to create policy to preclude literal starving artists would likewise diminish, and the question is only whether an artist would become rich and famous, etc. Capitalism survives, but not sell-enough-goods-or-die capitalism.

Pseudo-Marxist utopia though Jason's thought experiment might seem to be, it strikes me as valuable in this context precisely because it accommodates, in ways that a low-safety-net system does not, the possibility of marketplaces for products with almost no overhead. If everybody can, at baseline, stay alive and build lives for themselves reasonably well, then why would we need to have crazy arguments about structurally protective art distribution practices? Incentives could adjust in response to what people really want to spend their lives doing, etc., etc.

This post is a bit rambly, and I don't have a clear point I'm driving home. I'm just wondering if the solution to these economic problems is, in a sense, more fundamentally, formally macroeconomic than it is about the morality of art consumption and merit. I know we can never divorce ethics and policy, but I'm curious whether we can frame it a bit more practically.

I fully expect several of my points are ignorant and idiotic, and eagerly await my edification!

Forget Smarm and Snark. This is bigger than being ironic.

Note: Started this post a few weeks ago; now I've just come back and completed it.

I just finished eating lunch with Rich Brown, a faculty member in UW-Madison's Department of Family Medicine and the speaker for today's Neuroscience and Public Policy (NPP) seminar, and I have a curious case of the warm fuzzies. I'll be seeing him talk at 4.

For the past 24 hours -- that is, since walking out of a discussion section on the last seminar in the series, delivered by UW Life Sciences professor and wunderkind Dietram Scheufele -- I've been preoccupied with dark and gloomy thoughts on the state of the American political system. Research done by Scheufele, his colleague Dominique Brossard, and others on science communication has revealed some depressing implications for how we think informed dialogue and debate should go in the U.S. Basically, that body of work has exposed shortfalls in the so-called "deficit model" of public engagement in science: the idea that if only people were more familiar with the facts and figures, if only they knew what we who study an issue know, they would see things as we do and shake themselves loose of deeply-entrenched ideological positions.

As it turns out, that's not true. At the best, we've overestimated the persuasiveness of scientists or the open-mindedness of Americans (not to mention the possibility of being wrong in the first place). At worst, all the people who listen to evidence have already joined the team, and the people who remain are recalcitrant or simply subscribe to a different view on how facts matter in determining what is right and good. The extent to which new information changes their opinions tends to decrease with increased ideology and religiosity, though I'm not interested in falling head-over-heels into an ad hominem attack. The point is, we can't just sit people down in a room, show them the graphs, make sure they understand, and send them on their way to building a brighter, more rational world. We have probably been arrogant all along to believe academia has (or deserves?) that kind of power, at least to the extent the findings hold up.

You may have also heard some hubbub about comment sections, especially in science reporting, and how flamers and trolls really do distort people's perceptions of the science so they walk away with the wrong ideas. Again, that was Scheufele and Brossard.

At the end of Scheufele's lecture a couple weeks ago, the cameraman recording the talk for online access piped up during the Q&A session, saying that of the hundreds of lectures he'd thus recorded, this one was the most depressing. If the evidence suggests that many people just don't listen to facts and reason after all, how the heck are we going to solve the increasingly American problem of policy and politics divorced from reality-based solutions?

Scheufele, cheery and charming though he is, only said that his work identified a problem rather than posing a solution... and furthermore, he apologetically grimaced, he might be wrong?

Don't worry, I'll get back to Rich Brown and my warm fuzzies. Hang in there, I want you to get there with me.

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So yesterday's discussion section, concerned with Scheufele's talk, was a lightning round of political philosophy, legal analysis, and fruitless efforts to pin the cause of the problem on anything or anyone in particular. My friend in the Neuroscience and Law program, Joe Wszalek, quite defensibly felt there existed enough precedent and latitude in the framers' views on tyranny of majority to see our current gridlock as an unusually bad case of democratic flu, rather than the first symptoms of something more sinister. I adopted the view that, to extend the conclusions of Hacker and Piersson's Winner-Take-All Politics (also mentioned in my last post), our system is approaching the state of a "solved game" such as Connect 4, in which there exists an opening-move strategy that can never lose. I argued that in the current situation, that solution stems from the convergence of three things:

1. The American political system is designed so intently to check power that it is much more disposed to resist radical change than it is to adopt it, especially over the protests of a minority. It thus takes a lot less political will to keep things as they are than it does to change them.
2. Our electoral mechanisms ensure the survival of a two-party political system, in which gridlock is basically inevitable as party territory will forever shift to accommodate changes in political attitudes until it reaches a sort of Nash equilibrium. It's not coincidence that Presidential elections are routinely won 51-49.
3. One party has as its primary policy agenda the simple preservation of the status quo.

If that party chooses to use the leverage afforded them by our inertia-favoring system to enact inertia, they will rarely have to work harder than the other party or expend more political capital to win every fight they enter. This blog is not a book, at least not yet, so I will not go into a very long discussion on the particulars of my position, though I encourage you to research more on your own with Hacker & Pierson, and their skeptics, as a jumping-off point.

Then yesterday evening, I read this article in Gawker which introduced into the memetic lexicon a new (or at least, revitalized) buzzword, smarm, whose insidious spectre looms large over the internet's other favorite accusation, snark. In it Tom Scocco argued that, for all the legitimacy of complaints against needless snark in criticism, smarm -- a form of bulls**t characterized by hollow calls for civility and indignance at pettiness -- is the deadlier disease, for it can never be well-intentioned. It is "cynicism in practice," not in attitude, says Scocco, and he has a point. We all hate political talking points, even as we all acknowledge that in the current paradigm they're an inevitable part of playing the game. I, more than most progressives I hang around, insist we musn't dehumanize politicians and instead should blame the perverse incentives of this great big Connect 4 game we keep playing, but it doesn't change the fact that campaigns are more about (metaphorically, and maybe literally) gauging whether the median voter prefers McDonald's or Burger King than about what policies will best help the poor even eat there.

I even ended up reiterating with my girlfriend a previous debate we'd had about the character of politicians, the extent to which we should hate the players or the game, and whether it was even possible to run a nationally-visible campaign for public office primarily on evidence-based policy platforms.

Finally, this morning while putzing around waiting to meet Brown for lunch, my NPP colleague Princess Ojiaku bumped into me, and we talked about the implications of Scheufele's work and our fears that all this was intractable, despite my convictions that Americans are smart, deserve the smartest policies and politicians in the world, and would gladly bring all of it about given the chance. Even a follow-up to the discussion from our program's advisor, noting that researchers were working on ways to expose social media users to new ideas while still taking their preferences into account in generating newsfeeds, seemed like a concession prize; a footnote.

I was genuinely worried, for the first time in a long time, that nothing I or anyone else could do would stand a chance of changing all that. Princess and I left the building (which is dedicated to public and industry research cooperation), crossed University Ave. (on the campus of a school dedicated to sifting and winnowing for the truth and putting that truth to work for its state), and without remembering any of that, trudged down the hall towards the conference room for lunch.

----------------------

Richard Brown is a very nice guy, in a way that is both stereotypical and specific. Not a generic, neighbor-cuppa-sugar nice, but an I-bet-you're-interesting nice. He asked us about our research interests, and then he told us about his while we ate sandwiches. He's primarily interested in promoting the use of screening for mental health and substance use issues as a means of entry to interventions, which his research, done in collaboration with the La Follette School's Dave Weimer, has found to be a very effective way of ensuring that people get care they don't realize they need. He also told us about his favorite thing in the world, I'd judge: a style of medical support called Motivational Interviewing (MI). I'd heard of it, but I wasn't as familiar with it as I was with better-known tools in the therapist's toolkit -- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, mindfulness therapy, etc. I remembered it had something to do with giving the patient more credit for their successes.

He explained that MI was a means of interacting with patients that focused on maintaining the patient's agency. Instead of hunting for poor health behavior, harping on potential adverse outcomes, and hammering the desired changes, MI is structured to help patients volunteer useful information, form discrete goals, and analyze their own health problems. In particular, it requires the clinician to be supportive, non-adversarial, and above all empathetic towards the patient. The doctor is there to be a guided sounding board, a source of information, and affirmatively supportive. Ultimately, the objective is to help patients resolve ambivalence, arrive at a goal, and then commit to the changes they need to make to reach that goal.

Here's why this is relevant. MI has been shown to be more effective than traditional clinical practice in a number of different settings since it was formulated in the early 80's by Miller & Rollnick. The man on whose work MI is based, Carl Rogers, developed the humanistic approach to psychological counseling, and was eventually nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize because of the applications of his methods to cross-cultural conflict resolution in places like South Africa and Northern Ireland.

In other words, MI represents the evolution of a rhetorical style whose central tenet is that perspective-taking and empathy are the keys to persuasion. Now, I've been lucky enough to study the mechanisms of empathy, and its role in psychopathy, in a terrific lab, and I've been treated to some of the most cutting-edge thinking in the academic world on the subject by collaborators. Empathy alone is not the only thing that separates most people from psychopaths, but it's a big part, and I freely admit it's an idea at the center of a lot of my personal pet theories. With that disclaimer out of the way, in my view MI provides a certain measure of validation for empathy as a fulcrum in facilitative social transactions. If it's true that the "deficit model" fails to predict the stubbornness of many Americans in the face of scientific evidence, the role of empathy in MI may explain what science communication lacks, and naturally suggest how we should change our approach.

If the "deficit model" were accurate, then any amount of accurate information a doctor provided a patient would cause the patient to behave in a more health-promoting way. The success of MI relative to a more confrontational approach indicates that's not the case. Similarly, whenever scientists or organizations antagonize people who seem to either lack or ignore evidence, perhaps they are unthinkingly making their own task harder. The distortion of understanding caused by vitriolic comment sections, which would seem to suggest there's power in the adversarial approach, could just as easily be interpreted as polarization in response to overzealous troll-hunting by defenders of science. If we really want to change people's minds, we cannot afford to frame science communication as an us-versus-them decision. Despite every temptation to do so, the evidence here seems to indicate that, at least at the mass level, and given the tools of social media we have at our disposal, the high road really is the only road. And in particular, starting with an understanding of where those we disagree with are coming from is an important technique for changing minds.

____________________

Here's the thing. Scocco's point in the Gawker article is that snark, while somewhat destructive, is at least honest, while smarm is disingenuous and amounts to misdirection in the pretended name of civility. Rhetoric is not a new field, nor is persuasion a new technique, and I realize that by choosing to focus on the work of a few current science policy experts I'm omitting literally millenia of thought on how to reach people who refuse to face the truth when it's available. But all I'm really trying to say is the following.

• Ideological debate often precludes the implementation of science-based policy.
• Freedom of religion and a commitment to independent thought make it unlikely science will simply overrun ideologues in the near future, when a lot of science-based policy would be most effective to implement.
• Studies predict that convincing religious and ideological people of scientific fact is next to impossible.
• But maybe we've just been doing it wrong, and doing it right means treating our ideological opponents with the respect we want for ourselves.

I know that extremists piss scientists off all the time. I know they even put people's lives in danger. I know they make town-hall meetings hair-raising experiences, and we've been trying to take the high road a long time. But if the contrast between internet flame wars and cooperative doctor-patient interactions provides any insight at all, it's that the fact that it's hard doesn't mean we can compromise on our good-faith efforts to do science outreach not just diplomatically, but empathetically.

That's where the warm fuzzies came from. Maybe the quest to build society around shared knowledge isn't as hopeless as we thought, and maybe all that cheesy stuff that gives you the warm fuzzies is a necessary part of the solution after all.