Category: Observations

Observations

The Crusades: A Historical Barometer

pollywannamath

You are in a discussion with four or five strangers that seem to have at least a passing interest in history. Without openly discussing the twins of politics and religion, you want to learn more about your new companions and how they think. You decide to start a discussion about a historical topic and hope that it will prove more interesting than the current conversation about the weather. Hopefully, you will learn something interesting about each participant. What historical topic, if discussed, would be the most illuminating of a person’s political and historical biases?

The topic you choose needs to be well-known enough that the average person can discuss it. Ideally, it is recent enough to have primary sources with recorded opposing views and that any current disagreements reflect broader socio-political-religious differences.

After giving this a little thought, I’d shift discussion from the weather to the Crusades. Depending on a person’s understanding and biases, the Crusades range from a noble Christian salvation of a holy land, an unsuccessful wealth grab with a weak religious pretense, or a destabilizing intrusion of western forces and Christendom into a budding Muslim Seljuk Empire.

The Crusades have everything.

The disputes surrounding the Crusades mirror the disputes in political and religious thought today. What role should the West have in the development of the Middle East? What place should religious institutions have in government? How important is a Holy Land; is it worth protecting? Is Western Christianity a net positive? Is Western history “good”? Is it possible to separate religion and politics?

Even the name “Crusade” is charged and should evoke a response. I bet that even those with limited knowledge of the Crusades will show their priors because they will lean on their beliefs concerning Christianity or Islam or share the version of the Crusades they were taught in school.

Please let me know if you have a better recommendation.

Education, Observations

Sad Thoughts From A Happy Acheivement

pollywannamath

In May 2020, Princeton will graduate its first black valedictorian in its history. The student, Nicholas Johnson, is celebrated and deserves all of the praise that comes his way. The College; however, does not. Nor does the American educational system. Nicholas Johnson does not represent a shift in the American educational system, nor does he represent tremendous progress for Princeton.

Before I write a take-down of an event that should be lauded, I have to acknowledge that I am white and could not possibly be attuned to the power of messages like the one Nicholas Johnson represents. I have been fortunate to see almost exclusively white men pave the roads that I may follow in business, education, theology, and science. I cannot imagine being young, looking for inspiration, and only seeing people that do not reflect my skin tone or background. The intention of this piece is not to put a damper on Nicholas Johnson’s incredible achievement. It is not to hold Princeton accountable for its historical tradition of racism either.

I hope to contextualize Nicholas Johnson’s accomplishment in the broader context of minority education in America. Nicholas Johnson does not represent a turning point in American higher education, because he is not American. Nicholas Johnson is a Canadian.

Johnson did not grow up as a minority in the American educational system. He did not attend American high school. He did not have to confront the non-academic challenges that contribute to the racial achievement gap in American schools. That is not to say that Canada ‘solved racism’, or that schools in Canada are more egalitarian, but it should prevent US institutions from pointing to a Canadian achievement as progress. Johnson’s parents are both doctors, he went to an excellent high school, he unfortunately does not represent the situation of most American minority university students.

The second reason that the US should not point to his achievement as a global one, is that he will likely bring his talent to Canada once he earns his doctorate. He is a Canadian citizen, his parents live in Canada, and his senior thesis was focused on preventative health measures in Canada. I think its fair to assume that he has some home country pride:

My senior thesis was studying a preventative health intervention designed to curb the prevalence of obesity in Canada and modeling that particular type of health intervention as an optimization problem and then developing algorithms to solve that optimization problem on large scales. So, concretely, that would mean being able to take a preventative health intervention and scale it up such that it would be applicable for communities with thousands or tens of thousands of individuals. That was the most significant research project that I’ve worked on this year. I submitted that a few weeks ago and I’m very, very happy with what I was able to accomplish. 

The Daily Princetonian

I hope children of all races look up to Nicholas Johnson, but valedictorian is a personal achievement. He deserved the accolade on his own merits. The US high school system did not prepare him, and he did not get into a selective university because of a diversity policy (he was valedictorian of his prestigious high school). Instead of being an incredible story of personal achievement, his story may serve as distraction from the bleak truth of educational disparity in the US.

Observations, Technology

Should we care more about UFOs?

pollywannamath

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the US government released confirmation that three military videos containing unidentified objects are real and that the unidentified objects are unidentified. Does that mean that these unidentified objects are extraterrestrial? Alien UFO theories have been popular since the 30’s and provide a possible explanation for Fermi’s paradox.  Since the UFO sightings in Roswell, the mainstream dismissed those who believe in alien exploration of earth and that the UFOs are alien vehicles as kooks. Many are.

During this crisis, the UFO news passed with little fanfare. In the past, UFO sightings were explained as weather balloons, government experiments, or camera errors. In this case, the US government admits that it is not aware of the objects’ identity? With better cameras than were possible in the earliest conspiracies, what is the explanation now?

  • Extraterrestrial  activity
  • Civilian/NGO Prank
  • Other country’s military activity
  • US government attempt to downplay covid by creating a compelling news story
  • Other

None of the explanations above are comforting. Yet, UFOs have less interest than murder hornets in a google trends report.  Even if there is a 1% chance it is alien activity and a 1% chance that it is military action, we certainly aren’t concerned enough about UFO activity. The possible implications of military action the US can’t explain, or alien visitors are significantly larger than even the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Business, Observations

COVID-19 Policy Weighing Mechanism

pollywannamath

Too many policy discussions surrounding COVID-19 create a false dichotomy between those who prioritize the economy against those who prioritize reducing mortality. Data cateloging the spread of the virus, the severity and mortality rates, and time to vaccine are inconstant and contested from all sides of the policy debate. As a result, months into the pandemic, we (the public) don’t have a universally accepted model that predicts the end of the outbreak.

This uncertainty forces governing bodies to make a choice for when, what elements, and how to resume a functioning society. In the US the choice for how and when to reopen are left to the cities and states to determine. In some ways this make sense. Because the desease spreads unevenly and different regions will experience different severities of outbreak, multiple solutions might perform better than a one-size fits all approach. On the other hand, devoid of national guidelines, chaos reigns supreme.

Pundits, armchair politicians, and anyone with a computer have been quick to criticize places for opening too quickly or being too hesitant, but rarely offer a competing weighing mechanism or policy timeline.

I propose that we use the aggregate life-year change as the weighing mechanism to determine if a governing body should pursue a specific COVID-19 policy. The life year is a natural bridge between the economic and mortality focused sides of the debate. The idea behind the life year is to look at the loss of years from expected life that are tied to each COVID-19 death on one side and the number of anticipated year increases from a policy change on the other. There have been a number of studies on life year changes from educational attainment, child abuse, and income. Arguments for ending rest-in-place policies often cite educational losses, increase in child abuse, and decreases in incomes as reasons to reopen society.

Using the life-year scale will face two significant challenges. Many will be uncomfortable with discussions of death in years rather than lives and consider the scale dehumanizing. The second relates to quality of data, because mortality rates are still in question, critics will reject this scheme. To that end, I recommend using a very conservative mortality rate. Use a number that is almost certainly higher than truth across all age groups (e.g. 2% aggregate).

My recommendation is not a novel one. In a recent Marginal Revolution post, Tyler Cowen introduced a study that used life-year analysis (although he did not explicitly recommend its use). A group of researchers from South Africa explored the question of COVID-19 lockdown policies and expect that over 26,000 years will be lost to South Africa’s lockdown policies.

This analysis could help state and local leads make informed, data-driven, policy choices and provide structure for the national debate on COVID-19 policy.

Observations

Strict Scrutiny Needed

pollywannamath

Strict Scrutiny is, in the hosts’ words,  “A podcast about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it.”  I am a frequent listener; the hosts are quick-witted legal minds that provide a partial-but-supported analysis of the current cases and happenings in the Supreme Court.

In a recent episode, host Melissa Murray interviews Adam Cohen about his new book, Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America. This episode was uncharacteristically one-sided and left me wishing that Murray engaged with more of the ideas that Adam promotes in his book. As a disclaimer, I have not yet read the book, so the content of this post is specific to the episode (listen here).

As a response to the podcast, I penned a letter to Murray emphasizing the areas of the conversation that I wished received more airtime:

Melissa,

I am probably more conservative, and further removed from the legal profession than most of your listeners. Caveats out of the way, I listened to your recent conversation with Adam Cohen, and although I enjoyed it, I was hoping to hear more pushback and thoughtful consideration of his assertions during the conversation.

I have not yet read Cohen’s book, but I’ll summarize what I heard to be his argument during your conversation:

  • The Warren Court from 1962-1962 protected the rights of the people and better served the duties of the Supreme Court than any Court since
  • Nixon gutted the Warren Court, making way for a business-first, people-second judicial record since 1969
  • Since 1969 the Court gave rise to two primary forms of inequality that continue to increasingly damage the nation
    • Educational inequality
    • Wealth inequality

Adam’s framing brings a number of questions worth asking in conversation, yet most of his arguements were accepted as fact for the purpose of your conversation. One question I was glad to hear early in the conversation, is why did he start with the Warren Court?

The answer was that Adam views the Warren Court as a high water mark in Court history; and even though you asserted that the Courts on either side of the Warren Court in history would have been considered too conservative and pro-busienss to Adam, I would have liked more attention paid to Adam’s underlying belief about the Court.

The Warren Court during that time appears to me as a bit of an anomoly in the judical record. To use a subset of Warren’s reign as cheif justice as a starting point for a 50-year trend, is to obfuscate a considerablily longer trend and structural consequence of how the Court functions.

Adam seems to judge the Court based on a civil and human rights scale, I wish you specifically asked about his weighing mechanism and how he rated a justice based on her tenure. By which mandate are certain Courts “better” than others?

While I agree the government should do more to protect the rights of underprivileged classes and reduce inequality, I’m not sure that Adam is evaluating the right entity. A Court that has lifetime appointments, is not accountable to the Public, and that has no mandate to govern the people, may not be the right entity to judge on how well it benefits the public good for all.

In the words of Warren Court Justice, Felix Frankfurter, writing in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette:

But, as judges, we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic. We owe equal attachment to the Constitution, and are equally bound by our judicial obligations whether we derive our citizenship from the earliest or the latest immigrants to these shores. As a member of this Court, I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard. The duty of a judge who must decide which of two claims before the Court shall prevail, that of a State to enact and enforce laws within its general competence or that of an individual to refuse obedience because of the demands of his conscience, is not that of the ordinary person. It can never be emphasized too much that one’s own opinion about the wisdom or evil of a law should be excluded altogether when one is doing one’s duty on the bench. The only opinion of our own even looking in that direction that is material is our opinion whether legislators could, in reason, have enacted such a law. In the light of all the circumstances, including the history of this question in this Court, it would require more daring than I possess to deny that reasonable legislators could have taken the action which is before us for review.

Structurally, the Court will most likely be the most conservative entity of government due to its makeup and its mandate. I believe that Adam is judging the Court on a rubric made for Congress, and I hoped the conversation would explore the reasoning behind his assertions.

I will not be able to have this conversation with Adam, and the best I can do is write my thoughts in this letter. Thank you for each engaging episode; they built enough of an emotional connection to cause me to write this letter.