Confluence
At Lawyers, Guns and Money (I go back and forth on whether or not to italicize website names, which I would prefer to do but is apparently not the evolved standard) Scott Lemieux has a post up concerning Anthony Kennedy's opinion in Carhart II. The money quote:
While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude that some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained. Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.
Except, that, per the APA, it is exceptionable to conclude this. Unless you allow the word "some" to do a great deal of mealy-mouthed work (of course "some" women experience depression and loss of esteem after an abortion; "some" women also experience depression and loss of esteem after successfully giving birth, or at least that's what Brooke Shields would have you believe) this is actually a baseless claim. The APA's studies suggest that post-abortion depressive symptoms are about statistically on par with the occurence of the same symptoms among women who proceed with unplanned pregnancies, which is to say that getting pregnant when you weren't trying to is sometimes really shitty whatever you choose to do.
I say it's "baseless" but of course Justice Kennedy's "base" is in his intuition; he writes that it's "unexceptionable" because it seems evident to him and I'll bet it also seemed evident to most people he asked or would have asked if he did take an informal opinion poll. Hell, I would've guessed that there was some significant proportion of women who suffered depressive episodes post-abortion, although I like to think I would've made the logical leap to unplanned pregnancies in general. It's the sort of statement that unless you empirically know it to be false, or have differing intuitions, just "intuitively" seems reasonable.
And I say "confluence" in the post title because two minutes before I read the LGM post above I read this thread (which is actually about the best advice posters received from professional musicians) where one person relates studying with a mathematician who told him, "You rely a lot on intuition. That's good, because it sharpens your insights. Unfortunately, intuitions are usually wrong." The mathematician, of course is right.
My favorite example is the Monty Hall problem, which you can read about in some depth here, or to get an engaging story about the most famous public explication of the problem and insight from Mr. Hall himself, here. Now, as a mathematician in the second link suggests, the human brain seems particularly ill-wired to sort out issues of probability (I wonder if this is why 99.99% of reporters don't understand statistical margins of error). But even if this is an extreme example, not only of the failure of intuition but also the capacity of people convinced of their correctness to be insufferably arrogant and gracelessly self-righteous, the general point really does stand; human intuition usually isn't worth much.
Well, it's worth something because, for one thing, if you're interested in the functioning methods of human cognition it's probably interesting to think about why common intuition is wrong in one instance or another. And, of course, intuition is sometimes right, brilliantly so, transformatively so, although I'd (intuitively!) suggest that most of the great intuitive leaps of human achievement have resulted from the intuitive moment of someone who had spent a significant amount of their time thinking about related problems and not from someone who idly thought about a subject for a few minutes before coming to a radical insight. I'd also (intuitively!) suggest that commonly held intuitions are more likely to be borne out the softer the subject matter; ergo, it's more likely that an APA study would vindicate Justice Kennedy's intuition about the psychological effects of abortion than that someone's intuition about probability games would turn out to be accurate. And yet we're still wrong all the time. One facet of the human condition which has gathered a great deal of philosophical literature about itself (and with which literature I'm not very familiar) is the tricky problem of self knowledge. Sidestepping self knowledge for its own sake, all we have to go on when attempting to intuit human reactions and emotions in others, or in populations, is our lifetime of interpersonal experience, which is created by imperfectly and often incorrectly interpreting a statistically insignificant sample of other people's behavior, and the cautious application of our own self knowledge to others. And yet we frequently don't know ourselves at all! (Actually, I think I know myself pretty damn well, but then I've spent a lot of time thinking about myself, which in the end probably hasn't been good for me.)
Somewhere I had a point, but it's long lost. I just thought the confluence of reading those two snippets so close to each other would be an opportunity to ramble briefly on a subject that interests me. Two related addenda:
(1) I wish I knew more about, or would take the time to learn more about, the relatively new subfield dubbed "experimental philosophy." I could be completely wrong but my impression is that experimental philosophy is largely concerned with actually asking people their opinions of philosophical questions and incorporating the "folk wisdom" of an average collective response into philosophical work. If I've characterized it accurately, and even if my characterization is accurate it's probably insufficiently nuanced to be fair, you can guess that I'm going to take a dim view, unless the purpose of seeking out the "folk wisdom" is to talk about human perception of philosophical issues rather than the issues themselves. To give an example, I mean the difference between (a) describing human intuitions about ethical obligations and (b) describing ethical obligations, or even (b-1) describing the reasons for human intuitions about ethical obligations.
(2) Link-within-a-link! In the Monday Bullets from about six weeks ago basketball blogger extraordinaire Henry Abbott notes that:
It's the job of an NBA GM to take all the available data, interpret it, and make tough personnel decisions. But some of the available data these days is extremely intense. I suspect some of the best research is really not properly understood by the people at the top on some teams. And today I learn that same thing happens in the U.S. Supreme Court.
In general I think the issue/problem of judges and justices basing their decisions and opinions on data which they don't understand is interesting especially because I can't intuit a good solution. Outside of the Supreme Court, probably the most recognized jurist out there in the US is Richard Posner; at the least he's the most recognized jurist within academic circles regardless of discipline, because Posner is an academic and something of a polymath. Actually, despite the highly respected quality of his jurisprudence, his academic recognizability is undoubtedly due as much to his eager and broad pursuit of various intellectual avocations as it is to anything else. The problem is that as polymaths go he's not actually that impressive; at the least, he's not a very good literary critic because he's not actually a particularly sensitive or insightful reader. He may be better than the average adult American, but based on what I've read of his in the field he wouldn't rate as an actual English professor. All of which, tied together with Kennedy's cheerfully confident errors above, point to what is perhaps my ultimate point: lawyers aren't all that smart, as a class, and even though judges are presumably selected from among the smarter lawyers, "the smarter lawyers" is saying very little in the scope of human intellectual achievement.
While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude that some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained. Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.
Except, that, per the APA, it is exceptionable to conclude this. Unless you allow the word "some" to do a great deal of mealy-mouthed work (of course "some" women experience depression and loss of esteem after an abortion; "some" women also experience depression and loss of esteem after successfully giving birth, or at least that's what Brooke Shields would have you believe) this is actually a baseless claim. The APA's studies suggest that post-abortion depressive symptoms are about statistically on par with the occurence of the same symptoms among women who proceed with unplanned pregnancies, which is to say that getting pregnant when you weren't trying to is sometimes really shitty whatever you choose to do.
I say it's "baseless" but of course Justice Kennedy's "base" is in his intuition; he writes that it's "unexceptionable" because it seems evident to him and I'll bet it also seemed evident to most people he asked or would have asked if he did take an informal opinion poll. Hell, I would've guessed that there was some significant proportion of women who suffered depressive episodes post-abortion, although I like to think I would've made the logical leap to unplanned pregnancies in general. It's the sort of statement that unless you empirically know it to be false, or have differing intuitions, just "intuitively" seems reasonable.
And I say "confluence" in the post title because two minutes before I read the LGM post above I read this thread (which is actually about the best advice posters received from professional musicians) where one person relates studying with a mathematician who told him, "You rely a lot on intuition. That's good, because it sharpens your insights. Unfortunately, intuitions are usually wrong." The mathematician, of course is right.
My favorite example is the Monty Hall problem, which you can read about in some depth here, or to get an engaging story about the most famous public explication of the problem and insight from Mr. Hall himself, here. Now, as a mathematician in the second link suggests, the human brain seems particularly ill-wired to sort out issues of probability (I wonder if this is why 99.99% of reporters don't understand statistical margins of error). But even if this is an extreme example, not only of the failure of intuition but also the capacity of people convinced of their correctness to be insufferably arrogant and gracelessly self-righteous, the general point really does stand; human intuition usually isn't worth much.
Well, it's worth something because, for one thing, if you're interested in the functioning methods of human cognition it's probably interesting to think about why common intuition is wrong in one instance or another. And, of course, intuition is sometimes right, brilliantly so, transformatively so, although I'd (intuitively!) suggest that most of the great intuitive leaps of human achievement have resulted from the intuitive moment of someone who had spent a significant amount of their time thinking about related problems and not from someone who idly thought about a subject for a few minutes before coming to a radical insight. I'd also (intuitively!) suggest that commonly held intuitions are more likely to be borne out the softer the subject matter; ergo, it's more likely that an APA study would vindicate Justice Kennedy's intuition about the psychological effects of abortion than that someone's intuition about probability games would turn out to be accurate. And yet we're still wrong all the time. One facet of the human condition which has gathered a great deal of philosophical literature about itself (and with which literature I'm not very familiar) is the tricky problem of self knowledge. Sidestepping self knowledge for its own sake, all we have to go on when attempting to intuit human reactions and emotions in others, or in populations, is our lifetime of interpersonal experience, which is created by imperfectly and often incorrectly interpreting a statistically insignificant sample of other people's behavior, and the cautious application of our own self knowledge to others. And yet we frequently don't know ourselves at all! (Actually, I think I know myself pretty damn well, but then I've spent a lot of time thinking about myself, which in the end probably hasn't been good for me.)
Somewhere I had a point, but it's long lost. I just thought the confluence of reading those two snippets so close to each other would be an opportunity to ramble briefly on a subject that interests me. Two related addenda:
(1) I wish I knew more about, or would take the time to learn more about, the relatively new subfield dubbed "experimental philosophy." I could be completely wrong but my impression is that experimental philosophy is largely concerned with actually asking people their opinions of philosophical questions and incorporating the "folk wisdom" of an average collective response into philosophical work. If I've characterized it accurately, and even if my characterization is accurate it's probably insufficiently nuanced to be fair, you can guess that I'm going to take a dim view, unless the purpose of seeking out the "folk wisdom" is to talk about human perception of philosophical issues rather than the issues themselves. To give an example, I mean the difference between (a) describing human intuitions about ethical obligations and (b) describing ethical obligations, or even (b-1) describing the reasons for human intuitions about ethical obligations.
(2) Link-within-a-link! In the Monday Bullets from about six weeks ago basketball blogger extraordinaire Henry Abbott notes that:
It's the job of an NBA GM to take all the available data, interpret it, and make tough personnel decisions. But some of the available data these days is extremely intense. I suspect some of the best research is really not properly understood by the people at the top on some teams. And today I learn that same thing happens in the U.S. Supreme Court.
In general I think the issue/problem of judges and justices basing their decisions and opinions on data which they don't understand is interesting especially because I can't intuit a good solution. Outside of the Supreme Court, probably the most recognized jurist out there in the US is Richard Posner; at the least he's the most recognized jurist within academic circles regardless of discipline, because Posner is an academic and something of a polymath. Actually, despite the highly respected quality of his jurisprudence, his academic recognizability is undoubtedly due as much to his eager and broad pursuit of various intellectual avocations as it is to anything else. The problem is that as polymaths go he's not actually that impressive; at the least, he's not a very good literary critic because he's not actually a particularly sensitive or insightful reader. He may be better than the average adult American, but based on what I've read of his in the field he wouldn't rate as an actual English professor. All of which, tied together with Kennedy's cheerfully confident errors above, point to what is perhaps my ultimate point: lawyers aren't all that smart, as a class, and even though judges are presumably selected from among the smarter lawyers, "the smarter lawyers" is saying very little in the scope of human intellectual achievement.
Labels: Basketball, Culture, Vaguely Legal, Vaguely Philosophical
posted by medrawt at
19:48
