THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX, ER FOX, AS IN FOX MULDER
September 18, 2009
In a certain episode of The X-Files, the character Fox Mulder derides Occam’s Razor by renaming it “Occam’s Principle of Unimaginative Thinking.”
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_Ockham
For those who forget, occam’s razor suggests that whenever we have to choose between a complex hypothesis and a simpler hypothesis to explain the facts, we should always reject the complex theory favor of the simple one. “For nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident (literally, known through itself) or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture.” Id., see website supra.
this ends up being closely related to Ockham’s principle of ontological parsimony, see the website, supra.
art kyriazis, philly
home of the world champion philadelphia phillies
WHY THE DEMS DON’T GET IT
June 11, 2009
Unfortunately, in light of recent domestic policy directions, I think the Dems have it all wrong.
Health care reform is an idea left over from 1991. The only reason the Dems want to push it through now is because they have the votes to pass the bills they didn’t get passed in the first session of the first term of the Clinton Presidency.
But is this a good reason to pass a law, because you proposed it before and you’ve been trying to pass it for so long?
Universal Health Care is an idea born of POST-DEPRESSION affluence–it’s a fringe benefit to be offered to a population that’s already employed, that already has a guaranteed vacation, a guaranteed pension, and has guaranteed housing. In short, guaranteed health care is the LAST welfare benefit that should be federalized.
In addition, and this is a revision from my original post, according to a recent article posted in a respected publication, the health uninsured are not universally distributed throughout the United States.
In point of fact, less than 3% of Massachusetts residents lack health insurance, thanks to the state law health care coverage efforts of people like Gov. Mike Dukakis and his successors in office. The fact that Massachusetts has nearly universal health care coverage proves that this is a STATE problem and not a FEDERAL problem.
Looking more nationally, the Midwest and Northeast have fewer than ten per cent uninsured as to health care.
It is the South and the West that have 15-25% health uninsured rates; the highest being the state of Texas.
You don’t have to be a statistics major to know that Texas also is a non-union state, has a large number of illegal immigrant resident aliens, and that these conditions are pretty much true throughout the Sunbelt, where the problem of lack of health care coverage is an issue of non-union shops and illegal immigrants competing for jobs, which drives down the employers’ incentives to provide health care benefits.
Consequently, why is this a federal problem? This seems instead to be either an immigration problem, a union/labor law problem, or a combination of the two (as Janis Joplin and Big Brother used to sing). (She was from Texas, by the way, before she got out the San Francisco).
Moreover, if Texas wants to solve their own problems, why not let them experiment? They’ve already reformed tort law to make it much harder to sue MDs–welcome relief to the medical profession, which has flocked in droves to practice in Texas, now considered a medical mecca.
Obama wants to ruin all this. His health care proposal, according to reports, would result in a massive transfer of wealth from the largely democratic and already overtaxed midwest and northeast, and transfer it to the sunbelt states, the south and west, in order to mainly put on federal health coverage, non-union workers who are scabs (union busters) and illegal immigrants (also scabs and union busters).
Do we really want to spend our tax dollars paying for health benefits for strikebreaking scabs and unionbusting immigrant labor? And for illegal aliens to get health care?
Also, additionally, Obama’s health proposal will cause deep cuts in the current level of medicaid, medicare and drugs provided to the elderly under medicare.
In short, the proposal will triage the old and deprive them of expensive end of life care, and let them die more quickly, in order to provide basic health care to young, healthy labor that is non-union, largely hispanic, and living in the sunbelt.
The demographic implications of this over the long run will be a much younger, more hispanic united States, even more concentrated in the sunbelt than it already is, and will likely lead eventually to a bilingual nation that speaks Spanish and English, as well as to the ultimate downfall of unions, since one of the major arguments for unions is that they provide their members with health care and pension benefits during job and contract negotiations.
If unions are deprived of health care as a benefit to negotiate for, fewer workers will opt into unions. Obama and the democrats, paradoxically, are going to drive the death nail into the coffin of the union movement in this country. They haven’t thought through clearly the implications of what they are doing.
In short, this is a regional problem, and a union/immigration problem, and not a national problem. National mandates for the states would probably fix this, along with a public/private partnership with some insurance companies that could work with some of the southern and western states.
Part II
The REAL problem today is not health care at all.
The real problem today is that people don’t have jobs and they’re losing their houses. We have lawyers, bankers, traders who have blown up, car companies laying off, people all over America losing good jobs. Everywhere you go in this country, houses are for sale or being sold off by the sheriff.
I’ve never seen so many homes for sale in my own neighborhood. Twenty-Two years i’ve lived here, and three houses were a lot to be for sale here; now we have 25 and none are selling. There is a glut on the market where two years ago there was a boom in the market. The bottom has fallen out of the real estate market and no end of the downward spiral is in sight.
People’s equity in their homes, the main source of wealth for most Americans, has vanished, and the federal government has done NOTHING about it.
Except, of course, to bail out the rich fat cat bankers, and appoint a salary czar to oversee their million bazillion dollar bonuses.
Is this for real? Federally funded trickle down? If Reagan had done this, there would have been riots in the streets.
What we need precisely is a sort of FDIC, but instead of guaranteeing your banking deposits against banking failure, you would be guaranteed your home’s equity value, an FDIC for home equity, that will guarantee up to $1,000,000 of value in your home’s equity value against falling home prices, that is either automatic through fannie mae or freddie mac, or that you can purchase as insurance, for a small sum of money.
Now isn’t THAT a SENSIBLE idea?
Second, everyone with negative home equity should be forgiven their loans in excess of 80% of their debt loads immediately, and the banks commanded to write that debt off immediately.
Third, anyone who files for bankruptcy should be able to modify his or her mortgage under sections 1322 of the Code or anywhere else as pertinent, or under a Chapter 11 Plan, and cram it down the bank’s throat against their wishes if the bank’s loan exceed’s 80% of the value of the home and there is a negative equity spiral, the debtor should be able to eliminate all but 80% of the loan.
My point is, what good is free health care if you have no job and no house? It’s like serving gelato to a man who is homeless and has no money and hasn’t eaten in days–health care is like dessert.
Back in the 90s, when everyone had a job, it was ok to talk about health care–it was the LAST thing we needed. But now we’re back to square one–we need to talk about guaranteeing incomes, jobs and housing. We’re back to FDR and Truman and LBJ.
This administration just doesn’t get it.
Paradoxically, I think the right Republican approach might get it and win back the white house if it’s sufficiently populist in nature and goes after the big banks, which the democrats appear to be, pardon the expression, in bed with.
The Democrats need to examine an NRA-style national Jobs Program that will put everyone in the United States to work. Second, the Draft needs to be re-instituted. Kids that are in the army will be employed. Third, we need to nationalize the universities and make education free of charge. Fourth, we need to nationalize the cable companies and make the internet free of charge to the poor and to the rich equally, as well as making basic cable tv a free resource to everyone.
Fifth, for anyone that’s not employed, a Guranteed Annual Income or GAI must be mandated and paid by the Government, along with a negative income tax to avoid work related disincentives. The welfare reform measures of the Clinton era will have to be undone for the time being, because right now, middle class families are starving and in danger of homelessness, and THEY need welfare. The program needs to be federal, and the income level to be guaranteed needs to be large, around $15,000-20,000 annually, and adjusted for children and circumstances.
Sixth, the government has to embark on a massive program of propping up the housing market, investing in public housing, investing in Section 8, expanding the HUD budget, and so forth.
Seventh, we need to start investing in having one spouse stay home and take care of the kids. I know this is controversial, but two wage earners has destroyed many marriages and the american way of life.
Eighth, we need to reform the real estate brokerage business so that commissions from family homes are much less than for commission from commercial real estate. Instead of six points, let brokers earn only one point. This way, brokers won’t churn real estate and people won’t use their homes as profit tools.
Ninth, reform the tax code so that people have to pay MORE income tax on the sale of their primary homes, e.g. remove the exemption entirely, unless they stay in them a minimum of five years, unless they have to move for cause, such as a job-related transfer to another city, or medical reasons. This would stop people from buying and selling homes constantly and churning the market.
Tenth, more closely regulate lenders, brokers and sellers of real estate. Let people buy and sell and profiteer on second homes, commercial real estate and so forth, but those parcels will be taxed, etc.
I think this is the approach we need.
This is what the democrats are ignoring.
They’re going to raise taxes and bring down the house as it were on average joe while they raise up false idols like the bankers.
We badly need a new prophet in the land, and i’m not talking about Rush Limbaugh here.
–art kyriazis, philly/south jersey
home of the world champion philliesght
REPLY TO BLOG BY PROF. KARLAN ON BRIAN LEITER’S BLOG
April 10, 2009
I read with interest the following post by Prof. Pamela Karlan to Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports Blog at
http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2006/04/high_gpas_at_to.html:
April 19, 2006
High Undergraduate GPAs at Top Law Schools: What Do They Mean and What Are Their Consequences for Legal Education?
Pamela Karlan, a distinguished expert on voting rights and civil procedure at Stanford Law School, writes:
I read, with both interest and a fair amount of distress, the 75th percentile LSAT rankings. The distress came from seeing the staggering 75th percentile GPAs.
These could reflect at least three states of the world, two of them unfortunate. First, and most optimistically, the 40 schools on your list could all be admitting kids with amazing undergraduate academic achievements. (A 3.96 means, for example a student with 34A’s and 2 B+’s as an undergraduate; a 3.85 could mean half A’s and half A-’s.)
Second, the GPA’s could reflect rampant grade inflation at undergraduate institutions. Leave aside the abstract debate over whether the current generation of students is so much abler than its predecessors that good students should never see a grade below A- or B+. Most law schools have mandatory means or curves, and I’m aware of none where that mean is over around 3.4. (Even at the schools that don’t have official means, I would guess the actual mean is no higher than that.) Thus, virtually all law students will have lower, substantially lower, GPA’s in law school than they had in college. (E.g., at my own institution, 25% of the students had GPAs equivalent to what the number 1 student in the normal graduating class is likely to have.) This drop has a number of unfortunate consequences. Many of us are familiar with a huge demoralization effect the day first-semester grades come out and people who’ve been told all their lives that they are “A’s” at everything that’s measured hear for the first time that they’re “B’s.” They give up, and simply float through the remaining five semesters. Many have a self-protective defensive reaction: if the law doesn’t love them, then they distance themselves from it. In addition, at law schools where there are course-selection strategies that allow students to manipulate their GPA’s, students are then drawn not to taking what’s good or useful for them, but rather what’s most likely to boost their GPAs back toward the range they’ve internalized as normal. The high UGPAs mean that many of our students have never really learned to bounce back from academic disappointment (the “C” I got my first semester of college is one of the best things that ever happened to me) and like learning to ride a bicycle, it’s harder to learn that the older you get.
Third, to get those astronomical UGPA’s, students necessarily had to be either (a) extraordinary across the board for their entire undergraduate career (the student who bombs the first year of college because she wasn’t yet ready for the work or who was planning to be a physicist before he realized he didn’t have the mathematical ability can’t get one of these sky-high GPAs) or (b) strategic and risk-averse, taking only the kinds of courses in which they’d get A’s, from the time they were 17 or 18 years old. I’d bet it’s more the latter than the former. One of the things I always though the U.S. had over many other advanced countries was that we didn’t expect students to specialize in only what they were good at when they were still teenagers. But in order to get a 3.9 UGPA, students really can’t take things well outside their comparative advantages. Many of us see the consequences of this in what our students do: they’re passive and non-entrepreneurial in their job choices, going to large firms not because that practice particularly attracts them, but because it seems less “risky” right out of law school than going to smaller firms or government jobs. Many of them haven’t exercised their intellectual imaginations in years. Many are in fact not particularly well educated, since the science majors took few writing courses, the humanities people took perhaps one semester of economics and flee any quantitative subject, and the social and hard scientists know no American (let alone world) history at all.
Now, of course, we’re talking here only about the 75th percentile. Perhaps we could find the students who are comfortable with risk, entrepreneurial, academically and intellectually adventurous, and resilient among the other three-quarters of the class. But even the 25th percentile at top 20 schools have staggering UGPAs. And that sets the tone for the student body.
I’m not sure, as long as US News drives so much of the world, that there’s anything to be done. But it’s frustrating if what we’re trying to do is to train imaginative, entrepreneurial, courageous, resilient lawyers with broad perspectives that one of the central criteria for admitting students undermines our chances of doing that.
(end of Prof. Karlan’s comments).
Now I actually knew Pam growing up–she was one of a circle of debaters I knew who grew up debating in connecticut (she went to Hopkins Grammar School and then to Yale) and she’s enjoyed a great deal of success as a law school academic, although she’s way too liberal for my tastes (what law school academic isn’t liberal?).
On the plus side, I don’t think she’s a communist, but if she is, i’m not down with that at all.
My father fought those jerks in the greek civil war, and they were rat bastards, the communists. I can’t believe the democrats are actually meeting with castro in cuba right now.
Anyway, here were my comments in reply to her post:
An addendum to the comment above on grade inflation and test scores.
1) it is well-known that the ETS re-normed the SATS, LSATs, GREs and MCATs at least one standard deviation approximately sixteen years ago. Consequently, our generation of the 1970s and 1980s had a mean on the SAT and other standardized tests that was one standardized deviation higher than the current generation of students–our IQ in short, averaged around 100, while theirs literally averages 85. If you pin the bell curve tail on the donkey, that makes the top 1/2 % of the current generation dumber than the top five % of the previous generation.
So the students aren’t getting smarter, they’re getting dumber. That’s what renorming the test means.
I worked teaching all of the standardized tests for more than twenty years and wrote the pilot materials for the LSAT for Princeton Review in the early 1990s.
2) Grade inflation ain’t so except in the courses where professors are giving easy grades. At colleges that are conservative like Drexel, William and Mary, Hamilton, and so forth, grades are given out fairly and with rigor. It’s at some of the humanities departments that standards have fallen, and as certain classics and history professors have noted, along with scholarship–you can hardly find an actual greek, latin or byzantine professor today in a major ivy league university. When I visited Harvard, Prof. Finley was lecturing on Ancient Athens. Today, you’re more likely to hear some humanities teacher deconstructing gender based issues in some unknown text from last week, or worse still, deconstructing something from the internet.
3) TV, the internet, cellphones and laptops have definitively made current law students stupider. They don’t know how to write, they don’t know how to read books, and their research skills are shallow and poor. Most important, they lack the skill of memorization. I used to know where every single book was in certain law libraries, just as I knew where they were in huge undergrad libraries for years. That was a lot more useful skill than Boolean searches, which are not a thorough method of seeking out facts unless you already know the subject matter at hand.
4) Westlaw and Lexis led us to the horror that is Google.
5) Google is driving the book and newspaper out of existence, leading us to a famous Asimov short story of science fiction in which (in the near future) everyone forgets how to read and do math because computers do it for us–until a nuclear war destroys the machines and we become helpless, until one day a boy re-discovers how to do math by hand, and is proclaimed a genius.
This is the orwellian place we are all headed.
In addition to the foregoing comments, I would have also pointed out that Prof. Karlan’s basic point is wrong.
She assumes that students get high grades in college, and then come to Stanford Law and get lower grades because the competition is tougher.
This is actually ass backwards. I know Pam from when she was 18 and kicking back beers at college debate tournaments, so I know she likes to pontificate without factual basis from time to time, so here are some facts;
1) except for the top ten law schools, most law school applicants don’t have a 3.90 GPA or a very high LSAT. The vast majority of law students and lawyers are trained at 2d, 3d and 4th quartile schools as rated by US News and World Report rankings, or at local state law schools. Those students make up the vast majority of the bar.
2) students who go to Stanford, Yale, Harvard law schools only rarely practice law in the “real”world. They usually become law professors, judges, politicians etc. or work for rarified law firms. It’s unusual to see these folks work with actual clients or appear in actual courtrooms. Pam is a perfect example of this. She’s spent her life in the classroom, not in the real world.
3) Pam admits to getting a C or two at Yale, and I admit to that with Harvard. Because those schools were hard, back in the day. They were not easy, there was no grade inflation and the competition was brutal in most of the classes. Plus I was a premed on the side. So my GPA in college was nothing pretty, although it was definitely higher than a B average and i was recommended for honors, had a cum laude on my thesis and a summa on my general exam.
4) When I went to law school, after working a while, I thought it was MUCH EASIER than college. To be honest, I barely cracked a book open, worked forty hours a week at law firms collecting cold hard cash, and found the work at law school to be trivial. It was in law school that i got racks of As and only a couple of Bs. It was funny how many As I got. I won Am Jur Awards and Best Paper Awards (best grade in my class) every single semester I was in law school. It became like a joke how smart I was in law school, and yet, I really wasn’t working 1/8th as hard as I did in college.
Consequently, I don’t really know what Pam is talking about, not at all. My grades were disappointing to me in college but I worked my ass off to get them; but my grades in law school were terrific, and I hardly broke a sweat.
Next, as far as training law students to be imaginative, entrepreneurial or creative, I think that’s a deeply flawed and dangerous thing to do.
The last thing I as a businessman want my lawyer to be is creative, imaginative or entrepreneurial. I want my lawyer to be a lawyer, that is, an unimaginative little nebbish who grinds out papers and hands them to my enemy at 5pm on friday afternoon, or gets deals done by smiling and being at peace and harmony with everyone in the bar.
Creativity, imagination and entrepreneurship, I’m afraid, is reserved for the Schumpeterians of the world, that is to say, the guys at Business School, and that’s why Wharton has a Center for Entrepreneurship, and why I and my colleagues at various Business Schools teach Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Creativity at Business Schools around the North east directly, rather than teaching the stultifying subject of law. Law by its nature cannot be innovative, because it is precedential and must be followed to the letter of the law; whereas an inventor or entrepreneur is not bound by precedent and can be innovative.
I actually find Pam’s notion of what a good lawyer is to be incomprehensible. A good lawyer should be boring, ethical and should be able to repeat a statute from front to back thirty times in a row. Not creative, not innovative, not entrepreneurial, but efficient like a swiss army knife or a swiss watch. Efficiency and practice make for good lawyering. Also long hours spent learning how to write briefs exactly like everyone else writes them. The last thing you want to do in a brief is to introduce anything new, creative or innovative. Judges hate that. They just want you to follow the 8,000 appellate rules they’ve set forth for how to write the brief.
Good lawyers, then, are basically automatons. Clever and hard working automatons, but robots, essentially. In another century, they will in fact be replaced by AI possessing machines for many of their tasks, I predict. They’re already being outsourced to India for much of their robotic work such as document discovery, which was once thought to require intelligence and training. See my point?
Whereas good businessmen are creative, innovative and entrepreneurial.
5) A logic, rhetoric, oratory, philosophy background gets you through law school very easily; math and science make it trivial. All law problems are basically logic puzzles, and all law essays are basically debate/oratory speeches made in a philsophy manner of analyzing each question from both sides. This was perfectly normal to me. Undergrad teachers kept trying to make a marxist out of me, so they didn’t like my impartiality. Law professors loved it.
6) Law exams are graded without your name on the paper. No favoritism can creep into the grading. Undergrad is rife with favoritism and bias towards certain undergrads that the professors play favorites towards.
7) My friend NS who went to school with Pam at Yale thought Stanford Law was a joke after Yale undergrad; he thought it was a vacation. We used to get together frequently in Cali and hang out. He never seemed to work too hard.
8) My friend DB who went to harvard with me and then to Stanford Med thought Stanford Law was a joke after harvard undergrad and stanford med. He worked 40 hours at a top patent firm and saved all his money. Again, he had plenty of free time, he hardly worked at law school.
9) Law Schools should require all incoming students to study the following;
semester of logic, semster of intro to western philosophy
semester of oratory/rhetoric/speech
do two semesters of competitive speech/rhetoric/debate/parli
do two semesters of mock trial
spend a summer working at a law firm
spend a summer working at legal aid
spend a summer working for a judge
spend two years minimum working in business or somewhere between college and law school. The armed forces would be the best of all.
give preferential admission to army veterans, ROTC and reservists and end their anti-military culture.
sharply curtail the number of attorneys taking the bar nationally. End all state bars and apply one national bar, and only pass around 5,000 persons into it annually, and make them travel to one of three reginal centers nationally to take the exam, such as SF, CA, Chicago and New York, and only give the exam once a year.
Require proficiency in Spanish for ALL attorneys, since Spanish is required to speak to most clients on both coasts.
10) Science and business grad school were much more challenging and interesting than law school or undergrad. I would NEVER recommend to my own children to attend law school, maybe take a law class in business school, but not attend law school. The best combination out there today is the MD-MBA combined program, which I think is ideal in today’s economy.
These are some of the practical changes I would make to the legal eduction process.
I would probably close all but a handful of the existing law schools in the united states. Or, perhaps, people could obtain law degrees for reasons other than being a lawyer–for academic or scholarly purposes, as in europe, but not to be a lawyer or to make money. I’d convert a lot of the programs to MBA programs, actually.
we have way too many lawyers in this country and we need to reform the legal profession, reform tort law, and sharply regulate the profession before it drives all of the doctors, drug makers and other competent businessmen out of this country for good.
One final note, and this is about Pam’s constitutional law book, which she authored with Cass Sunstein, Mark & Rebecca Tushnet, Louis Seidman & Geoffrey Stone. This casebook has been ranked one out of five stars by nearly everyone who ranked it on Amazon dot com. I happen to be a fan of Pam, of Cass Sunstein (except for his dumping Martha Nussbaum, who I’m a bigger fan of, for that stupid Irish younger woman professor at Harvard who’s the big Obama fan) and I really am a big fan of Mark and Rebecca Tushnet–Rebecca was one of Harvard’s best debaters ever in the 1990s–and Mark is a very smart guy–but apparently brains doesn’t mean you can write a casebook as good as Larry Tribe’s.
Here’s a sample comment from Amazon dot com;
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars Terrible Casebook, December 13, 2008
By kiki (Baltimore, MD) – See all my reviews
It’s a casebook, so it’s not supposed to be great reading, but this one is by far the worst casebook I’ve ever had. The only thing a casebook needs to do to achieve mediocrity is contain cases. This doesn’t, not really. It gives you the cliff’s notes of important cases. One sentence blurbs about others. And pages and pages of rambling, aimless, academic debate. It may be a good book for Con Law professors and others who have already read all of the cases discussed. For someone trying to learn con law, it is useless. It is also organized very poorly. Any class organized around this book is doomed from the start. If your professor uses this book, take another class. If you can’t take another class, buy the Chemerinsky treatise and rely on that instead. Professors: DO NOT USE THIS BOOK.
the website address is above, if you want to check out the remarks and the book yourself. Perhaps there will be a revised edition. I realize that Pam writes and talks a lot. As I said, part of her strength, and her weakness, is that she talks and writes too much, and perhaps she spreads herself a little thin.
When I was a litigator, I litigated civil rights matters in the trenches, and won them. It’s not as hard as it seems. You need to have a firm grasp of the history of the United States from 1776 through about 1900 to understand the reconstruction and civil war era, in order to make some sense of what the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments mean.
I actually think Justice Scalia had some pertinent remarks on US v. Cruikshank in the recent gun rights case. He noted that the US Supreme Court in that 1874 case took the right of bearing arms away from african american militia men under the second amendment, because of white supremacist views which were going on at the time. the dispute was that armed militias of african americans and republicans were fighting ku klux klansmen in Mississippi and elsewhere in the south, and the african american plaintiffs claimed a second amendment right to bear arms as a militia.
The US Supreme Court said no, that’s only a federal right against the federal government, not against the states, ignoring incorporation under the 14th amendment.
Scalia basically says now that Cruikshank was wrong, and that african americans had the right to arm themselves as a militia in 1874 and defend themselves against the Klan in the 1870s.
I think that’s an interesting point of view. Of course, an armchair liberal like Karlan would never consider that Scalia would have anything interesting to say.
But here at the Sophist, we think there are two sides to every question.
–art kyriazis
philly/nj home of the world champion phillies
–art kyriazis
HAPPY EASTER AND PASSOVER TO ALL
April 7, 2009
I wanted to wish a Happy Easter and a Happy Passover to all.
There’s an old joke, that goes something like this. A liberal is arguing with a conservative about the death penalty. Finally, exasperated, the conservative says to the liberal, “of course I’m in favor of the death penalty–without the death penalty, there’d be no Easter and no Easter Bunny!”
While this is an awful joke, it does remain true that in the two major capital punishment trials that we know about in history, Socrates and Jesus, as best we know, both were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death. I won’t even get to the OJ trial, although as we all know, the glove didn’t fit and they had to acquit.
Obviously Socrates and Jesus could have used Johnny Cochran as their lawyer.
Socrates on dying, was reputed to have said something like, I die, you live, god knows who is going to the better place. Those of us who are religious of course believe that death brings us closer to a better place indeed, but Socrates provides a flash of insight that this short life is not the only one, that there is a spiritual and inner life that transcends death. Religion ministers to the soul, or at least to our conception of the soul, and consequently it is a vital part of our lives.
The Passover story about Moses leading the chosen people out of bondage and out of Egypt is a great story, as well as being an integral part of the old testament. “Exodus” is actually ancient greek for “Exothos” or “Exit” or “Leaving”. It’s the title of the book from the Ancient Greek Septuagint. The entire point of Exodus is the story of the Chosen People Leaving, “Exothos”, from Egypt and their bondage. God frees them from slavery and bondage through Moses and a series of miracles, each one greater than the last, which are celebrated each and every Passover.
It is such an important story because it gives hope to every oppressed peoples that God will redeem every one in bondage, free them and lead them to their own Promised Land. When Martin Luther King spoke of reaching the Promised Land, it was the Passover Story he was referring to. He didn’t need to explain that to his listeners, many of whom were careful Bible readers. The African-Americans of this country understood about bondage, redemption, and being led out of bondage and to the Promised Land.
On this Passover, we should think about these matters in considering President Obama, a man who has the potential to unite many different elements of society, and perhaps finally lead a people to the Promised Land. All oppressed peoples the world over hearken to the story of Exodus.
I’ve always had a strong faith in God and I don’t doubt God’s existence. Recently there’s been a spate of books and articles by respected scholars advocating atheism and the non-existence of God. I find this to be an awful waste of scholarly time, and especially of taxpayer and endowment money. Isn’t there something important these guys should be doing on our nickel?
Richard Dawkins, who once wrote a book called “The Selfish Gene,” is one of these. He used to teach at Harvard, now teaches in England, and appears to enjoy bashing God and religion in his books. Dawkins used to be a capable biologist. In his old age, he’s turned into a menacing crank who hates old ladies who go to church and pray to the saints and God for the memories of their dead husbands.
How mean can you possible get?
You might call him “The Selfish Dean” because he really seems only to care about himself. Is this what tenure breeds? Idiotic books about atheism? Pushed on us by editors and publishing houses?
Belief in God is a personal matter, but it also means a commitment to others, and to doing things for others, without considering the personal benefit to yourself. Sitting around the table at Easter, at Seder, at any family gathering, we give thanks to our creator and Lord for family, for health, for happiness. I can’t imagine a life without God or without prayer, a life without church or without friends from church or the church community.
I’ve looked at Dawkins’ books on atheism. They are poorly written, poorly argued, and basically are rants.
It’s not a careful argument.
A careful argument, for example, would be Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles, or Martin Luther’s 95 Theses against the Catholic Church, or John Calvin’s immense work of theology criticizing the Roman Catholic Church and setting forth the tenets of Calvinism.
Those are careful and thoughtful books, which make their cases carefully, point by point.
Dawkins’ books by contrast are awful and poorly researched and poorly written. It’s embarassing to see a professor publish such awful work. Especially when he was able while younger to write such a good book on biology as “The Selfish Gene.” It’s readily apparent Dawkins’ writing and intellectual skills have sharply declined with age.
But assuming that Dawkins (and any of these other atheists) has/have any rational or reasonable points to make, I’d like to refute them with Pascal’s Wager, for one. I think Dawkins is already refuted by the Transcendental a priori arguments of Kant for God’s existence, but Blaise Pascal made a classic probability argument which is, in fact, irrefutable on mathematical and utility grounds, for God’s existence.
Pascal said you should believe in God, because if you did, even if there was only a 1 in a million chance of his existence, the benefits would be eternal salvation, whereas if you denied Him, the possible harm would be eternal damnation.
Consequently, it’s a lot like the nuclear calculus–the benefits are so great, that even if there’s only a slight chance of God existing, it’s worth going all in on God. If you win, you get eternal salvation forever. (the nukes argument goes like, if there’s a one in a million chance of starting World War III, the harm is so great, you have to avoid it, because it’s nuclear winter and the death of mankind, so the policy can’t be adopted).
If you lose the wager, you burn in hell forever. I kind of envision Dawkins burning in a really hot part of hell, by the way. The part where they keep Bernie Madoff, child molesters, child molesting catholic priests and every single convicted defendant whose story was the real basis for the plot line of a LAW AND ORDER:SVU episode. Those stories are really pretty awful. This is a digression, but it’s hard to believe that’s Jayne Mansfield’s daughter in that show, by the way. Mariska Hargitay, emmy winning actress, now approximately in her mid-40s, and still very beautiful, is the daughter of Mickey Hargitay (a former Mr. Universe) and Jayne Mansfield, the 1950s starlet/sex bomb. I think you’d have to say that Mariska Hargitay has really had a solid acting career.
As for all of those who doubt God’s existence or lack faith in God, I give you an extended discusion of Pascal’s Wager from the Stanford Encylopaedia of Philosophy.
Pascal’s Wager
By Alan Hajek, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
“Pascal’s Wager” is the name given to an argument due to Blaise Pascal for believing, or for at least taking steps to believe, in God. The name is somewhat misleading, for in a single paragraph of his Pensées, Pascal apparently presents at least three such arguments, each of which might be called a ‘wager’ — it is only the final of these that is traditionally referred to as “Pascal’s Wager”. We find in it the extraordinary confluence of several strands in intellectual thought: the justification of theism; probability theory and decision theory, used here for almost the first time in history; pragmatism; voluntarism (the thesis that belief is a matter of the will); and the use of the concept of infinity.
We will begin with some brief stage-setting: some historical background, some of the basics of decision theory, and some of the exegetical problems that the Pensées pose. Then we will follow the text to extract three main arguments. The bulk of the literature addresses the third of these arguments, as will the bulk of our discussion here. Some of the more technical and scholarly aspects of our discussion will be relegated to lengthy footnotes, to which there are links for the interested reader. All quotations are from §233 of Pensées (1910, Trotter translation), the ‘thought’ whose heading is “Infinite—nothing”.
• 1. Background
• 2. The Argument from Superdominance
• 3. The Argument from Expectation
• 4. The Argument from Generalized Expectations: “Pascal’s Wager”
• 5. Objections to Pascal’s Wager
• Bibliography
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries
1. Background
It is important to contrast Pascal’s argument with various putative ‘proofs’ of the existence of God that had come before it. Anselm’s ontological argument, Aquinas’ ‘five ways’, Descartes’ ontological and cosmological arguments, and so on, purport to give a priori demonstrations that God exists. Pascal is apparently unimpressed by such attempted justifications of theism: “Endeavour … to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of God…” Indeed, he concedes that “we do not know if He is …”. Pascal’s project, then, is radically different: he seeks to provide prudential reasons for believing in God. To put it crudely, we should wager that God exists because it is the best bet. Ryan 1994 finds precursors to this line of reasoning in the writings of Plato, Arnobius, Lactantius, and others; we might add Ghazali to his list — see Palacios 1920. But what is distinctive is Pascal’s explicitly decision theoretic formulation of the reasoning. In fact, Hacking 1975 describes the Wager as “the first well-understood contribution to decision theory” (viii). Thus, we should pause briefly to review some of the basics of that theory.
In any decision problem, the way the world is, and what an agent does, together determine an outcome for the agent. We may assign utilities to such outcomes, numbers that represent the degree to which the agent values them. It is typical to present these numbers in a decision matrix, with the columns corresponding to the various relevant states of the world, and the rows corresponding to the various possible actions that the agent can perform.
In decisions under uncertainty, nothing more is given — in particular, the agent does not assign subjective probabilities to the states of the world. Still, sometimes rationality dictates a unique decision nonetheless. Consider, for example, a case that will be particularly relevant here. Suppose that you have two possible actions, A1 and A2, and the worst outcome associated with A1 is at least as good as the best outcome associated with A2; suppose also that in at least one state of the world, A1′s outcome is strictly better than A2′s. Let us say in that case that A1 superdominates A2. Then rationality surely requires you to perform A1.
In decisions under risk, the agent assigns subjective probabilities to the various states of the world. Assume that the states of the world are independent of what the agent does. A figure of merit called the expected utility, or the expectation of a given action can be calculated by a simple formula: for each state, multiply the utility that the action produces in that state by the state’s probability; then, add these numbers. According to decision theory, rationality requires you to perform the action of maximum expected utility (if there is one).
Example. Suppose that the utility of money is linear in number of dollars: you value money at exactly its face value. Suppose that you have the option of paying a dollar to play a game in which there is an equal chance of returning nothing, and returning three dollars. The expectation of the game itself is
0*(1/2) + 3*(1/2) = 1.5,
so the expectation of paying a dollar for certain, then playing, is
-1 + 1.5 = 0.5.
This exceeds the expectation of not playing (namely 0), so you should play. On the other hand, if the game gave an equal chance of returning nothing, and returning two dollars, then its expectation would be:
0*(1/2) + 2*(1/2) = 1.
Then consistent with decision theory, you could either pay the dollar to play, or refuse to
play, for either way your overall expectation would be 0.
Considerations such as these will play a crucial role in Pascal’s arguments. It should be admitted that there are certain exegetical problems in presenting these arguments. Pascal never finished the Pensées, but rather left them in the form of notes of various sizes pinned together. Hacking 1972 describes the “Infinite—nothing” as consisting of “two pieces of paper covered on both sides by handwriting going in all directions, full of erasures, corrections, insertions, and afterthoughts” (24).[1] This may explain why certain passages are notoriously difficult to interpret, as we will see. Furthermore, our formulation of the arguments in the parlance of modern Bayesian decision theory might appear somewhat anachronistic. For example, Pascal did not distinguish between what we would now call objective and subjective probability, although it is clear that it is the latter that is relevant to his arguments. To some extent, “Pascal’s Wager” now has a life of its own, and our presentation of it here is perfectly standard. Still, we will closely follow Pascal’s text, supporting our reading of his arguments as much as possible.
There is the further problem of dividing the Infinite-nothing into separate arguments. We will locate three arguments that each conclude that rationality requires you to wager for God, although they interleave in the text.[2] Finally, there is some disagreement over just what “wagering for God” involves — is it believing in God, or merely trying to? We will conclude with a discussion of what Pascal meant by this.
2. The Argument from Superdominance
Pascal maintains that we are incapable of knowing whether God exists or not, yet we must “wager” one way or the other. Reason cannot settle which way we should incline, but a consideration of the relevant outcomes supposedly can. Here is the first key passage:
“God is, or He is not.”
But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up… Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, you knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose… But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is… If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.
There are exegetical problems already here, partly because Pascal appears to contradict himself. He speaks of “the true” as something that you can “lose”, and “error” as something “to shun”. Yet he goes on to claim that if you lose the wager that God is, then “you lose nothing”. Surely in that case you “lose the true”, which is just to say that you have made an error. Pascal believes, of course, that the existence of God is “the true” — but that is not something that he can appeal to in this argument. Moreover, it is not because “you must of necessity choose” that “your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other”. Rather, by Pascal’s own account, it is because “[r]eason can decide nothing here”. (If it could, then it might well be shocked — namely, if you chose in a way contrary to it.)
Following McClennen 1994, Pascal’s argument seems to be best captured as presenting the following decision matrix:
God exists God does not exist
Wager for God Gain all Status quo
Wager against God Misery Status quo
Wagering for God superdominates wagering against God: the worst outcome associated with wagering for God (status quo) is at least as good as the best outcome associated with wagering against God (status quo); and if God exists, the result of wagering for God is strictly better that the result of wagering against God.
(The fact that the result is much better does not matter yet.) Pascal draws the conclusion at this point that rationality requires you to wager for God.
Without any assumption about your probability assignment to God’s existence, the argument is invalid. Rationality does not require you to wager for God if you assign probability 0 to God existing. And Pascal does not explicitly rule this possibility out until a later passage, when he assumes that you assign positive probability to God’s existence; yet this argument is presented as if it is self-contained. His claim that “[r]eason can decide nothing here” may suggest that Pascal regards this as a decision under uncertainty, which is to assume that you do not assign probability at all to God’s existence. If that is a further premise, then the argument is valid; but that premise contradicts his subsequent assumption that you assign positive probability. See McClennen for a reading of this argument as a decision under uncertainty.
Pascal appears to be aware of a further objection to this argument, for he immediately imagines an opponent replying:
“That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much.”
The thought seems to be that if I wager for God, and God does not exist, then I really do lose something. In fact, Pascal himself speaks of staking something when one wagers for God, which presumably one loses if God does not exist. (We have already mentioned ‘the true’ as one such thing; Pascal also seems to regard one’s worldly life as another.) In other words, the matrix is mistaken in presenting the two outcomes under ‘God does not exist’ as if they were the same, and we do not have a case of superdominance after all.
Pascal addresses this at once in his second argument, which we will discuss only briefly, as it can be thought of as just a prelude to the main argument.
3. The Argument From Expectation
He continues:
Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness.
His hypothetically speaking of “two lives” and “three lives” may strike one as odd. It is helpful to bear in mind Pascal’s interest in gambling (which after all provided the initial motivation for his study of probability) and to take the gambling model quite seriously here. Recall our calculation of the expectations of the two dollar and three dollar gambles. Pascal apparently assumes now that utility is linear in number of lives, that wagering for God costs “one life”, and then reasons analogously to the way we did! This is, as it were, a warm-up. Since wagering for God is rationally required even in the hypothetical case in which one of the prizes is three lives, then all the more it is rationally required in the actual case, in which one of the prizes is eternal life (salvation).
So Pascal has now made two striking assumptions:
(1) The probability of God’s existence is 1/2.
(2) Wagering for God brings infinite reward if God exists.
Morris 1994 is sympathetic to (1), while Hacking 1972 finds it “a monstrous premiss”. It apparently derives from the classical interpretation of probability, according to which all possibilities are given equal weight. Of course, unless more is said, the interpretation yields implausible, and even contradictory results. (You have a one-in-a-million chance of winning the lottery; but either you win the lottery or you don’t, so each of these possibilities has probability 1/2?!) Pascal’s best argument for (1) is presumably that “[r]eason can decide nothing here”. (In the lottery ticket case, reason can decide something.) But it is not clear that complete ignorance should be modeled as sharp indifference. In any case, it is clear that there are people in Pascal’s audience who do not assign probability 1/2 to God’s existence. This argument, then, does not speak to them.
However, Pascal realizes that the value of 1/2 actually plays no real role in the argument, thanks to (2). This brings us to the third, and by far the most important, of his arguments.
4. The Argument From Generalized Expectations: “Pascal’s Wager”
We continue the quotation.
But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. It is all divided; wherever the infinite is and there is not an infinity of chances of loss against that of gain, there is no time to hesitate, you must give all…
Again this passage is difficult to understand completely. Pascal’s talk of winning two, or three, lives is at best misleading. By his own decision theoretic lights, you would not act stupidly “by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you”—in fact, you should not stake more than an infinitesimal amount in that case (an amount that is bigger than 0, but smaller than every positive real number). The point, rather, is that the prospective prize is “an infinity of an infinitely happy life”.
In short, if God exists, then wagering for God results in infinite utility.
What about the utilities for the other possible outcomes? There is some dispute over the utility of “misery”. Hacking interprets this as “damnation”, and Pascal does later speak of “hell” as the outcome in this case. Martin 1983 among others assigns this a value of negative infinity. Sobel 1996, on the other hand, is one author who takes this value to be finite. There is some textual support for this reading: “The justice of God must be vast like His compassion. Now justice to the outcast is less vast … than mercy towards the elect”.
As for the utilities of the outcomes associated with God’s non-existence, Pascal tells us that “what you stake is finite”. This suggests that whatever these values are, they are finite.
Pascal’s guiding insight is that the argument from expectation goes through equally well whatever your probability for God’s existence is, provided that it is non-zero and finite (non-infinitesimal) — “a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss”.[3]
With Pascal’s assumptions about utilities and probabilities in place, he is now in a position to calculate the relevant expectations. He explains how the calculations should proceed:
… the uncertainty of the gain is proportioned to the certainty of the stake according to the proportion of the chances of gain and loss… [4]
Let us now gather together all of these points into a single argument. We can think of Pascal’s Wager as having three premises: the first concerns the decision matrix of rewards, the second concerns the probability that you should give to God’s existence, and the third is a maxim about rational decision-making. Specifically:
1. Either God exists or God does not exist, and you can either wager for God or wager against God. The utilities of the relevant possible outcomes are as follows, where f1, f2, and f3 are numbers whose values are not specified beyond the requirement that they be finite:
God exists God does not exist
Wager for God ∞ f1
Wager against God f2 f3
2. Rationality requires the probability that you assign to God existing to be positive, and not infinitesimal.
3. Rationality requires you to perform the act of maximum expected utility (when there is one).
4. Conclusion 1. Rationality requires you to wager for God.
5. Conclusion 2. You should wager for God.
We have a decision under risk, with probabilities assigned to the relevant ways the world could be, and utilities assigned to the relevant outcomes. The conclusion seems straightforwardly to follow from the usual calculations of expected utility (where p is your positive, non-infinitesimal probability for God’s existence):
E(wager for God) = ∞*p + f1*(1 − p) = ∞
That is, your expected utility of belief in God is infinite as Pascal puts it, “our proposition is of infinite force”. On the other hand, your expected utility of wagering against God is
E(wager against God) = f2*p + f3*(1 − p)
This is finite.[5] By premise 3, rationality requires you to perform the act of maximum expected utility.
Therefore, rationality requires you to wager for God.
We now survey some of the main objections to the argument.
5. Objections to Pascal’s Wager
Premise 1: The Decision Matrix
Here the objections are manifold. Most of them can be stated quickly, but we will give special attention to what has generally been regarded as the most important of them, ‘the many Gods objection’ (see also the link to footnote 7).
1. Different matrices for different people.
The argument assumes that the same decision matrix applies to everybody. However, perhaps the relevant rewards are different for different people. Perhaps, for example, there is a predestined infinite reward for the Chosen, whatever they do, and finite utility for the rest, as Mackie 1982 suggests. Or maybe the prospect of salvation appeals more to some people than to others, as Swinburne 1969 has noted.
Even granting that a single 2 x 2 matrix applies to everybody, one might dispute the values that enter into it. This brings us to the next two objections.
2. The utility of salvation could not be infinite.
One might argue that the very notion of infinite utility is suspect — see for example Jeffrey 1983 and McClennen 1994.[6] Hence, the objection continues, whatever the utility of salvation might be, it must be finite. Strict finitists, who are chary of the notion of infinity in general, will agree — see Dummett 1978 and Wright 1987. Or perhaps the notion of infinite utility makes sense, but an infinite reward could only be finitely appreciated by a human being.
3. There should be more than one infinity in the matrix.
There are also critics of the Wager who, far from objecting to infinite utilities, want to see more of them in the matrix. For example, it might be thought that a forgiving God would bestow infinite utility upon wagerers-for and wagerers-against alike — Rescher 1985 is one author who entertains this possibility. Or it might be thought that, on the contrary, wagering against an existent God results in negative infinite utility. (As we have noted, some authors read Pascal himself as saying as much.) Either way, f2 is not really finite at all, but ∞ or -∞ as the case may be. And perhaps f1 and f3 could be ∞ or -∞. Suppose, for instance, that God does not exist, but that we are reincarnated ad infinitum, and that the total utility we receive is an infinite sum that does not converge.
4. The matrix should have more rows.
Perhaps there is more than one way to wager for God, and the rewards that God bestows vary accordingly. For instance, God might not reward infinitely those who strive to believe in Him only for the very mercenary reasons that Pascal gives, as James 1956 has observed. One could also imagine distinguishing belief based on faith from belief based on evidential reasons, and posit different rewards in each case.
6. The matrix should have more columns: the many Gods objection.
If Pascal is really right that reason can decide nothing here, then it would seem that various other theistic hypotheses are also live options. Pascal presumably had in mind the Catholic conception of God — let us suppose that this is the God who either ‘exists’ or ‘does not exist’. By excluded middle, this is a partition. The objection, then, is that the partition is not sufficiently fine-grained, and the ‘(Catholic) God does not exist’ column really subdivides into various other theistic hypotheses. The objection could equally run that Pascal’s argument ‘proves too much’: by parallel reasoning we can ‘show’ that rationality requires believing in various incompatible theistic hypotheses. As Diderot 1875-77 puts the point: “An Imam could reason just as well this way”.[7]
Since then, the point has been represented and refined in various ways. Mackie 1982 writes, “the church within which alone salvation is to be found is not necessarily the Church of Rome, but perhaps that of the Anabaptists or the Mormons or the Muslim Sunnis or the worshippers of Kali or of Odin” (203). Cargile 1966 shows just how easy it is to multiply theistic hypotheses: for each real number x, consider the God who prefers contemplating x more than any other activity. It seems, then, that such ‘alternative gods’ are a dime a dozen — or aleph one, for that matter.
Premise 2: The Probability Assigned to God’s Existence
There are four sorts of problem for this premise. The first two are straightforward; the second two are more technical, and can be found by following the link to footnote 8.
1. Undefined probability for God’s existence. Premise 1 presupposes that you should have a probability for God’s existence in the first place. However, perhaps you could rationally fail to assign it a probability — your probability that God exists could remain undefined. We cannot enter here into the thorny issues concerning the attribution of probabilities to agents. But there is some support for this response even in Pascal’s own text, again at the pivotal claim that “[r]eason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up…” The thought could be that any probability assignment is inconsistent with a state of “epistemic nullity” (in Morris’ 1986 phrase): to assign a probability at all — even 1/2 — to God’s existence is to feign having evidence that one in fact totally lacks. For unlike a coin that we know to be fair, this metaphorical ‘coin’ is ‘infinitely far’ from us, hence apparently completely unknown to us. Perhaps, then, rationality actually requires us to refrain from assigning a probability to God’s existence (in which case at least the Argument from Superdominance would be valid). Or perhaps rationality does not require it, but at least permits it. Either way, the Wager would not even get off the ground.
2. Zero probability for God’s existence. Strict atheists may insist on the rationality of a probability assignment of 0, as Oppy 1990 among others points out. For example, they may contend that reason alone can settle that God does not exist, perhaps by arguing that the very notion of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being is contradictory. Or a Bayesian might hold that rationality places no constraint on probabilistic judgments beyond coherence (or conformity to the probability calculus). Then as long as the strict atheist assigns probability 1 to God’s non-existence alongside his or her assignment of 0 to God’s existence, no norm of rationality has been violated.
Furthermore, an assignment of p = 0 would clearly block the route to Pascal’s conclusion. For then the expectation calculations become:
E(wager for God) = ∞*0 + f1*(1 − 0) = f1
E(wager against God) = f2*0 + f3*(1 − 0) = f3
And nothing in the argument implies that f1 > f3. (Indeed, this inequality is questionable, as even Pascal seems to allow.) In short, Pascal’s wager has no pull on strict atheists.[8]
Premise 3: Rationality Requires Maximizing Expected Etility
Finally, one could question Pascal’s decision theoretic assumption that rationality requires one to perform the act of maximum expected utility (when there is one). Now perhaps this is an analytic truth, in which case we could grant it to Pascal without further discussion — perhaps it is constitutive of rationality to maximize expectation, as some might say. But this premise has met serious objections. The Allais 1953 and Ellsberg 1961 paradoxes, for example, are said to show that maximizing expectation can lead one to perform intuitively sub-optimal actions. So too the St. Petersburg paradox, in which it is supposedly absurd that one should be prepared to pay any finite amount to play a game with infinite expectation. (That paradox is particularly apposite here.)[9]
Finally, one might distinguish between practical rationality and theoretical rationality. One could then concede that practical rationality requires you to maximize expected utility, while insisting that theoretical rationality might require something else of you — say, proportioning belief to the amount of evidence available. This objection is especially relevant, since Pascal admits that perhaps you “must renounce reason” in order to follow his advice. But when these two sides of rationality pull in opposite directions, as they apparently can here, it is not obvious that practical rationality should take precedence. (For a discussion of pragmatic, as opposed to theoretical, reasons for belief, see Foley 1994.)
Is the Argument Valid?
A number of authors who have been otherwise critical of the Wager have explicitly conceded that the Wager is valid — e.g. Mackie 1982, Rescher 1985, Mougin and Sober 1994, and most emphatically, Hacking 1972. That is, these authors agree with Pascal that wagering for God really is rationally mandated by Pascal’s decision matrix in tandem with positive probability for God’s existence, and the decision theoretic account of rational action.
However, Duff 1986 and Hájek 2001 argue that the argument is in fact invalid. Their point is that there are strategies besides wagering for God that also have infinite expectation — namely, mixed strategies, whereby you do not wager for or against God outright, but rather choose which of these actions to perform on the basis of the outcome of some chance device. Consider the mixed strategy: “Toss a fair coin: heads, you wager for God; tails, you wager against God”. By Pascal’s lights, with probability 1/2 your expectation will be infinite, and with probability 1/2 it will be finite. The expectation of the entire strategy is:
1/2*∞ + 1/2[f2*p + f3*(1 − p)] = ∞
That is, the coin toss strategy has the same expectation as outright wagering for God. But the probability 1/2 was incidental to the result. Any mixed strategy that gives positive and finite probability to wagering for God will likewise have infinite expectation: “wager for God iff a fair die lands 6″, “wager for God iff your lottery ticket wins”, “wager for God iff a meteor quantum tunnels its way through the side of your house”, and so on.
The problem is still worse than this, though, for there is a sense in which anything that you do might be regarded as a mixed strategy between wagering for God, and wagering against God, with suitable probability weights given to each. Suppose that you choose to ignore the Wager, and to go and have a hamburger instead. Still, you may well assign positive and finite probability to your winding up wagering for God nonetheless; and this probability multiplied by infinity again gives infinity. So ignoring the Wager and having a hamburger has the same expectation as outright wagering for God. Even worse, suppose that you focus all your energy into avoiding belief in God. Still, you may well assign positive and finite probability to your efforts failing, with the result that you wager for God nonetheless. In that case again, your expectation is infinite again. So even if rationality requires you to perform the act of maximum expected utility when there is one, here there isn’t one. Rather, there is a many-way tie for first place, as it were.[10]
Moral Objections to Wagering for God
Let us grant Pascal’s conclusion for the sake of the argument: rationality requires you to wager for God. It still does not obviously follow that you should wager for God. All that we have granted is that one norm — the norm of rationality — prescribes wagering for God. For all that has been said, some other norm might prescribe wagering against God. And unless we can show that the rationality norm trumps the others, we have not settled what we should actually do.
There are several arguments to the effect that morality requires you to wager against God. Pascal himself appears to be aware of one such argument. He admits that if you do not believe in God, his recommended course of action will “deaden your acuteness.” One way of putting the argument is that wagering for God may require you to corrupt yourself, thus violating a Kantian duty to yourself. Clifford 1986 argues that an individual’s believing something on insufficient evidence harms society by promoting credulity. Penelhum 1971 contends that the putative divine plan is itself immoral, condemning as it does honest non-believers to loss of eternal happiness, when such unbelief is in no way culpable; and that to adopt the relevant belief is to be complicit to this immoral plan. See Quinn 1994 for replies to these arguments. For example, against Penelhum he argues that as long as God treats non-believers justly, there is nothing immoral about him bestowing special favor on believers, more perhaps than they deserve. (Note, however, that Pascal leaves open in the Wager whether the payoff for non-believers is just, even though as far as his argument goes, it may be extremely poor.)
Finally, Voltaire protests that there is something unseemly about the whole Wager. He suggests that Pascal’s calculations, and his appeal to self-interest, are unworthy of the gravity of the subject of theistic belief. This does not so much support wagering against God, as dismissing all talk of ‘wagerings’ altogether.
What Does It Mean to “Wager for God”?
Let us now grant Pascal that, all things considered (rationality and morality included), you should wager for God. What exactly does this involve?
A number of authors read Pascal as arguing that you should believe in God — see e.g. Quinn 1994, and Jordan 1994a. But perhaps one cannot simply believe in God at will; and rationality cannot require the impossible. Pascal is well aware of this objection: “[I] am so made that I cannot believe. What, then, would you have me do?”, says his imaginary interlocutor. However, he contends that one can take steps to cultivate such belief:
You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc…
But to show you that this leads you there, it is this which will lessen the passions, which are your stumbling-blocks.
We find two main pieces of advice to the non-believer here: act like a believer, and suppress those passions that are obstacles to becoming a believer. And these are actions that one can perform at will.
Believing in God is presumably one way to wager for God. This passage suggests that even the non-believer can wager for God, by striving to become a believer. Critics may question the psychology of belief formation that Pascal presupposes, pointing out that one could strive to believe (perhaps by following exactly Pascal’s prescription), yet fail. To this, a follower of Pascal might reply that the act of genuine striving already displays a pureness of heart that God would fully reward; or even that genuine striving in this case is itself a form of believing.
Pascal’s Wager vies with Anselm’s Ontological Argument for being the most famous argument in the philosophy of religion. As we have seen, it is also a great deal more besides.
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Copyright © 1998, 2001
Alan Hájek
ahajek@hss.caltech.edu
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
See also, Stephen R. Welch’s page on Pascal’s Wager
old
DOES DEREK LOWE THROW THE SPITTER? OR IS HE JUICING?
April 7, 2009
In the Phil’s home opener, the boobirds waited all of half an hour to get on Brett Myer’s case just because he gave up a couple (ok, three) home runs early to Atlanta. In this case, those runs held up as Derek Lowe, formerly of the Boston Red Sox and the LA Dodgers, and acquired by the Braves as an off-season free agent, did his thing and limited the Phils to just one run.
However, I am extremely curious as to why it is that Derek Lowe is suddenly such an effective pitcher at 36 years of age, an age when most pitchers are usually either washed up or on the way down. He’s known for throwing a hard sinker, and right away, looking at him pitch and throwing that sinker, it really looks like a doctored pitch, either a spitter, a scuffball, an emery ball, or something put on the ball to make it dive.
The question then is, since there are two sides to every question, is there any evidence that Derek Lowe suddenly got better in the middle of his career when it looked like he wasn’t going anywhere fast? One hint is given in Rob Neyer’s Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers (Simon & Schuster, NY, 2004), where it states about Derek Lowe that he is six foot six, weighs 214 pounds, and throws “1. Hard Sinker 2. Curve 3. Change 4. Cut Fastball Note: The Cut Fastball was added or refined in 2002, when Lowe went from relieving to starting.” Id. at p. 285. Well, so Lowe added a “cut fastball.” Really.
In 2001, out of the bullpen, Lowe allowed 103 hits in 91 and 2/3 innings, gave up 7 homers, 39 runs and 36 earned runs, and walked 29 batters, while striking out 82, with an ERA of 3.53 and a park adjusted ERC of 4.31, according to the Bill James Handbook for 2009, id. at p. 172. He won five games, and lost ten, and had 24 saves in 30 opportunities.
The next year, 2002, when he started and “learned the cut fastball,” his numbers were dramatically better. Lowe won 21 and lost just 8, with an ERA of 2.58, an adjusted ERC of 2.13, pitching 219 2/3 innings, giving up only 166 hits, only 65 runs and 63 earned runs, allowing 17 homers, walking only 72 and striking out 127 batters.
The question becomes, how did Lowe get so much better?
The answer should be pretty obvious from the fact that the year before, in 2001, striking out 82 batters in 103 innings, Lowe wasn’t effective, while in 2002, striking out 127 batters in 220 innings, Lowe was terrific. LOWE COMMITTED TO THE SINKER, OR ELSE LEARNED HOW TO THROW THE SPITTER. Since Lowe is 6’6” tall, coming with a good fastball, curve and change, a spitter/scuff ball/doctored pitch that drops off the table in necessary situations is a great out pitch for him, especially since he was pitching in Fenway Park.
Alternatively, Lowe may just have started juicing. After all, it worked for A-Rod.
After that dramatic success, Lowe had another good year in 2003, winning 17 and losing 7, but in 2004 although he won 14 and lost only 12, his ERA ballooned up to 5.42 with a park-adjusted ERC of 5.31. Lowe was now 31 years old. Lowe led the AL in runs allowed in 2004 with 138. It was reasonable for the Red Sox to think he was beginning to embark on an age-related decline. So off to the LA Dodgers went Derek Lowe.
From 2005 through 2007, Lowe had almost identical seasons statistically, with ERAs around 3.60 and park adjusted ERCs between 3.50 and 3.70; in 2006 he led the NL in wins with 16, going 16 and 8 on the year. Every year he pitched around 210 innings, allowed around 100 runs, 90 earned runs, 15 homers, and struck out around 125 to 140 batters while only giving up 55 walks. He was like a machine.
In 2008, Lowe broke out of this pattern, and actually had a BETTER year—211 innings pitched, 194 hits, 84 runs allowed, 76 earned runs, 14 homers, 45 walks, 147 strikeouts, 14 wins and 11 losses, an ERA of 3.24 and a park adjusted ERC of 2.72. 2008 was Lowe’s best season since 2002, and this at age 35.
And now Derek Lowe comes out of the gate in the first ballgame of 2009, and twirls a masterpiece against the Phillies, a team that scored the third highest number of runs in the National League in 2008, and a lineup that is packed with lefthanded power bats.
Which brings me round to the topic sentences—is Derek Lowe throwing the spitball? Or is he just juicing? Because a 36 year old pitcher just can’t be this good. He’s BETTER now than he was two years ago, and pitching BETTER now than he did at any time in his career, except for his breakout year in 2002, which was a year when almost everyone in baseball was juicing.
I’m sorry for accusing a ballplayer of cheating, but we live in awful times, and I just don’t believe Derek Lowe is that good. The next question is, does Derek Lowe’s pitching profile resemble that of other spitballers? The answer is clearly, yes.
Ed Walsh of the White Sox threw a spitball, a fastball, a change and a curve. Don Drysdale of the Dodgers, also a 6 foot five inch right hander, very similar to Derek Lowe in almost every way, and who relied on the Vaseline ball, threw a fastball, a curve, a change, a slider and a spitter. Senator Jim Bunning of the Phillies and Tigers, also a spitball/Vaseline ball artist, and also a tall righthander, threw a slider, a fastball, a curve, a change and a spitter, usually a doctored Vaseline ball. Bunning threw a no-hitter and a perfect game in his hall of fame career.
Hugh Casey is another famous tall righthander who supposedly threw the spitball, although it’s claimed his out pitch was the sinker, supplemented by a slider, fastball and a curve. According to Neyer, Hugh Casey was pitching on the mound and threw a spitter to Mickey Owen in the 1941 World Series; that was the famous passed ball that led to the Dodgers losing the Series. Id. at p. 57.
Then you have Gaylord Perry, who was also a tall righthander, six foot four, 205 pounds in his prime, heavier later, a great spitballer, who also threw the slider, the fastball, the curve, the forkball/splitter and the change. Perry also claimed his spitter was a sinker, although after he retired he admitted it really was a spitball after all.
So comparing Derek Lowe to many of the famous spitballers, and their pitching repetoires, it would seem that there is a pretty good match. Derek Lowe is the same build as Don Drysdale and Gaylord Perry, and uses approximately the same pitches as they did. In sum, the circumstantial evidence against him is pretty strong that Derek Lowe probably is using a spitball, and not really throwing a sinker at all. Finally, you have the fact that pitchers like Gaylord Perry lasted long past their points of decline–Perry was winning twenty games at ages like 35 and 40–further evidence Lowe is greasing the ball.
–art kyriazis, philly/south jersey
home of the world champion Philadelphia Phillies
SIXERS BEAT THE LAKERS IN LA
March 19, 2009
A very unusual thing happened the other night–something that hasn’t happened in a long time–the Sixers beat the Lakers, with Kobe Bryant playing, in LA, 94-93 on a three point buzzer beater by Andre Iguodala. I’m pretty sure some of the many celebrities that watch Laker basketball were stunned and sullen as they filed out of the building into their ferraris and maseratis and hybrids. This win capped off a four game win streak for the sixers, who have looked very fine indeed without Elton Brand weighing them down.
Coach Tony DiLeo has finally woken up to the fact that he has a three point shooter on his bench named Donyell Marshall, and has been deploying Marshall in key situations in games lately to, uh, shoot the three ball, something I’ve been lobbying for all year long. Notably, this strategy has been working quite well. When Marshall and Royal Ivey hit the three, Young and Iguodala and Speights can go to work inside without drawing double teams, or else Marshal and Ivey get free looks from the three line.
Even thought the Sixers lost in Phoenix last nite 125-116 and have three more games on the road this western trip, the Sixers are now 34-32, hold the 6th seed in the NBA east, and project to a 98% chance of making the playoffs. They are five games ahead of the Bucks who are 9th in the NBA east with 16 games to play, and 3 1/2 games ahead of the Chicago Bulls who are in the 8th seed, and 1 1/2 games ahead of Detroit, which continues to struggle without Iverson, who is hurt and out.
Speaking of the Bulls, ex-Sixer John Salmons dropped 38 points on the Celtics the other night in beating the Celtics. Even though he only scored 14 as the Sixers beat the Bulls in Philly, Salmons has become quite a much better player, and the Sean Webber trade is beginning to look worse and worse in hindsight. Salmons has become a great player and Webber was just a bust. Salmons could have been the two guard the sixers are now needing, and all we had to do was do nothing but hold onto him and let him develop. The Sixers have let a lot guys like Larry Hughes and John Salmons get away from them over the years, and after a while, you have to wonder, who is evaluating the talent around here? Would you keep Willie Green and Lou Williams and trade away John Salmons and Larry Hughes and Kyle Korver????
i don’t think so….but yet that’s the way this franchise has gone the past few years. They’ve let some explosive scorers leave for very little in return.
In addition, Eddie Stefanski, the GM, does not seem anxious to re-sign andre miller the point guard, who right now based on win shares and everything else, is the most valuable sixer on the team other than Iguodala.
If you take miller away from the sixers, the team cannot run the floor as well or as effectively, and they will need an entire season to adjust to a new point guard. It would be wiser to just re-sign Miller and let him play here until he can’t play anymore, and then work a new guy into the mix. Miller deserves it.
Also, Miller is durable. He has played something like 530 consecutive NBA games, the longest such streak in the NBA. Right now, he is more durable than Allen Iverson, or at least as durable as AI was when AI was in his prime. Miller is the youngest 32 year old I’ve ever seen play, he’s fast, he’s durable, he doesn’t get hurt, and he plays about five years younger than his age, and his game is beautiful to watch.
This signing is a no brainer. Dump elton brand, re-sign andre miller. please. please please.
–art kyriazis, philly/south jersey
home of the world champion phillies
Indifference to death is the supreme claim of a successful moral theory. Mortality, the biblical threescore and ten years we are given on this earth, is and was the human condition for the ancients and the moderns. Transcendence of mortality therefore becomes a categorical imperative for any moral theory to attain success.
At a recent alumni dinner where there were a number of attorneys, i asked some of my colleagues around the table if they had given any thought to the afterlife. Most of the people at the table looked at me as if I had landed from another planet. I pressed the point, and asked, you get ready for trials, but what about the ultimate trial, the final trial, the final judgment in the life to come? Don’t you want to be ready for that? Again, blank faces and almost no thought given to the concept in the slightest. I found this interesting, and wanted to give it some thought. This essay was the result.
Maybe this is what is wrong with the legal profession today. Lots of ethics courses, but no courses as to the essence of ethical thought–the soul and its salvation. And yet Plato and Aristotle, especially Plato, write about the soul, about lawyers and the salvation of the soul in the life to come, and about ethics, almost to the exclusion of all else. And of course, Christianity absorbs Plato through neo-Platonism, and a lot of Aristotle too. So have we forgotten everything we learned back at the dawn of Western thought? Have we forgotten that you can’t take it with you, to paraphrase a famous play we used to read in prep school? That a rich man will find it harder to get into heaven than a camel to pass through the eye of a needle? That Lazarus will be by God’s side while the rich man will be burning from thirst in hell? Have we forgotten all of this in our search for worldly rewards?
I assume we all agree here that Bernie Madoff is definitely going to hell, but we’re not sure what level of Dante’s Inferno he’s being assigned at present.
So here are a few comments on four ethical systems that have given plenty of thought on this matter, and incidentally, most every lawyer in the greco-roman world was at the very least, a stoic or a christian.
Characteristically convergent in the three moral systems of Stoicism, Spartanism and Samurai/Bushido is the conquest of death through roughly parallel means. Christianity in its neo-platonic formulation through the Hellenistic church fathers, starting with Clement of Alexandria and running through the Greek Church Fathers, St. Basil of Caesarea, St. Gregory of Nazianzen, St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. John Chrystostomos, and finding its eventual final expression in St. Augustine, a much later Latin church father, also conquers death as well.
As St. John Chrystostomos so memorably puts it, “Death, Where is Thy Sting?” However, Christian eschatology and cosmology sharply distinguish it from the Stoic, Spartan and Samurai traditions. There will be a second coming, and a second judgment, a final judgment, but so long as the Christian adheres to the seven sacraments and worships through the Church, his salvation is ordained, and he or she will be saved in the life to come. Here, we are speaking of the early Eastern Christian church, 100 AD – 1000 AD, as opposed to the later Western church, 1000 AD – present, which was split by the east-west schism, the Albigensian Crusade, the 4th Crusade, the Crusades in general, the Protestant movements, and so on. The early Church, by contrast, was relatively unified (setting aside the Arian, Manichean and Nestorian and other heresies, which are not material here) and was constituted by its seven ecumenical councils as a unified and generic whole. Even as to the schismatic churches of the Near East, the churches of Nestorianism and so forth, which had millions of adherents up through around 1400 AD in Syria, Iran, China and many other areas where the majority religion was either Muslim or other, the message was the same, that death could be overcome by salvation through the Church.
By Stoicism we refer to the ancient Greek philosophy which emerged in Athens at the stoa, which is best known by the work of greek philosophers such as Epictetus, and follow it to its most perfect expression in the Roman philosophies of such writers as Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. The Roman/Latin followers of stoicism, of whom there were many, were comfortable with stoicism, since it was perfectly suited to a milititaristic society ruled by capricious and arbitrary imperial factions which could change suddenly and without warning, often with drastic policy implications. Because conditions were constantly volatile at the micro level, even though there was an overall “pax Romana,” stoicism was an ideal philophy.
We note in this introduction the essentially dual character of stoicism, as both a military and an ethical philosophy, one ideally suited to the greek or roman warrior or pacific citizen alike. The warrior at peace in stoic tranquility could perform his military assignments with a minimum of moral concern either for his enemy’s or his own death; likewise the citizen going about his tasks was also able to work hard, indifferent to illness, suffering or the exigencies of mortality, and to the machinations of politics and the state.
Turning to the Spartan way of life, which was essentially a philosophy and ethical system, again we see a military and ethical system in place. First, we define the Spartan system as that system in place in Ancient Sparta from roughly 700 BC to approximately 350 BC, when the Spartan State began to lose its military supremacy to Thebes, and lost its martial character and started to blend shortly thereafter into the larger Hellenistic World created by Alexander the Great and his Successors.
During their time of glory, the Spartan method of training and educating their men and women was legendary throughout the ancient world, and it has come down to us even in the present day. The very word “spartan” connotes sparse, spare, lean and other similar adjectival synonyms. That a spartan soldier would fight to the death was a given; that he was happier to die gloriously in battle than to die and old man in his village was well-known. Thus even Pericles was known to quote the Spartans in saying that a good death in battle could wipe out a lifetime of evil deeds. But the Spartans virtue was a sort of corporate virtue, not the individual Achaean virtue or heroism of Achilles or Ajax; Spartans fought as a team. Their methods were legendary; their morality their code.
Finally we have the samurai, who lived by the code of bushido. In this moral code, elaborated on many occasions by learned samurai, the samurai warrior, who was always a learned man fluent in poetry, calligraphy and the arts, as well as the martial arts and the sword, was to consider himself at all times as if he was already dead. This core, bedrock principle of bushido, along with the zen Buddhist principles of “no mind” or “empty mind”, encapsulate bushido’s essential qualities—the clear-minded warrior, ready to strike, unafraid of death because in his mind, he has already died, and thus is already prepared for death. Such an adversary must have been dangerous indeed.
That there are parallels between these three systems with regards to their attitudes towards death and mortality is self-evident from our brief discussion. A longer exegesis would examine all of these systems in greater detail, but this brief review suffices to carry across the general motive and ethical points.
Art Kyriazis philly/south jersey
home of the world champion phillies
