Piquing PolitiFact: Corrections and $timulu$

I pointed out some time ago that PolitiFact had reported a figure for Obama stimulus package that was off by a factor of a billion. I subsequently pointed out the error at PolitiFact's FaceBook page.

clipped from www.facebook.com

Bryan White

Rep. Young offered a fair paraphrase of Obama. The PolitiFact writer seems to be the one who provided the quotation marks. The writer also mischaracterized the topic of Obama's comments. It wasn't the economy. It was the deficit, and Obama as much as admitted responsibility for almost a third of it. And one last (minor) thing: a $787 stimulus package? This was a poor excuse for journalism.

November 12 at 4:57am · Delete · Report

Granted, I pointed out the error in what may be regarded as a subtle way.

After that, on occasion I would swing by the PolitiFact entry containing the error. Nothing changed.

Noting that Angie Drobnic Holan (who appears to wholly or mostly handle PolitiFact comments at Facebook) solicits e-mail pointing out errors, I offered an alternative suggestion. Why not dedicate a thread on the "Discussions" page to errors?

clipped from www.facebook.com

Post #1

You wroteon November 20, 2009 at 11:22am

PolitiFact encourages readers to point out errors by sending e-mail.
But why not use public posting for the same function? How hard would it be to dedicate a thread to alleged inaccuracies?

As a bonus, an open system enhances accountability and public awareness.

Would PolitiFact seriously not bother to change the amount of the stimulus bill from $787 to $787 billion simply because nobody wants to go through the trouble of e-mailing the complaint?
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/nov/11/cw-bill-young/us-rep-claims-obama-told-republicans-shut-and-go-/

I never received any reply to my message, but today I noticed that PolitiFact finally fixed the error. But apparently without any correction notice. Protect the brand! Error? We made no error.

Ever the helpful sort, I added another message to the thread:

Hey, thanks for fixing the stimulus spending number that had been off by a factor of a billion!

But now I'm curious. Did PolitiFact hold off until the error was pointed out via e-mail or act on the basis of commentary at the FaceBook page? And the page in question carries no notice that it has been updated or corrected for error. Is that common practice at the Times?

In the Know: Setting new standard for site search efficiency ...

I chided the St. Petersburg Times for editing out all of the specific details from its AP version of the Climatic Research Center e-mail hack story.

It is a good thing I embedded the URL for that version of the story in an earlier post, or else I may never have found it again.

I challenge anyone to find the story using the Times' site search feature. And if you find it, please stop back by to tell me what search terms you used.

In the know, baby.

Elaine Dances

After six straight posts on libertarian free will, it is time to strike a lighter note:



Somebody needs to develop an instructional DVD series on how to dance like Elaine Benis.

I've got to study those moves more ...

"Chance cannot directly cause our actions"

So states astronomer/philosopher Bob Doyle, the creator of the "Information Philosophy" Web site.

With context added:

Chance cannot directly cause our actions. We cannot be responsible for random actions.

Doyle appears to adhere to a type of compatibilist free will, though he may well consider his view libertarian. Doyle calls his free will model "The Cogito Model" and attempts to explain the chance aspects of indeterminism without damaging the attractive aspects of libertarian free will.

Important elements of the model have been proposed by many philosophers since Aristotle, the first indeterminist. A number of modern philosophers and scientists, starting with William James, have proposed similar two-stage models of free will. But none of them has been able to locate the randomness so as to make free will "intelligible," as libertarian Robert Kane puts it.

My take on that later. Back to Doyle:

The Cogito solution is not single random events, one per decision, but many random events in the brain as a result of ever-present noise, both quantum and thermal noise, that is inherent in any information storage and communication system.

Doyle's solution, I believe, comes very close to fulfilling its billing. But what is this "noise"? Doyle avoids the traditional antecedent problem by locating the noise within the deliberation process. However, if the noise is not under the control of the self, then his solution appears vulnerable to criticisms such as Galen Strawson might offer. Where the causes of indeterminism are outside the control of the self, the connection to deep moral responsibility appears tenuous at best.

Doyle expends considerable energy promoting a particular feature of his model, that decisions are always "adequately determined," meaning that the results are functionally deterministic even if not strictly deterministic.''

The results of the model, therefore, give us something akin to divine interference with the human will, except it is impersonally deterministic--though Doyle credits the will with an ability to selectively ignore the indeterministic noise suffiently to develop an evolutionary advantage. That mechanism awaits explanation.

Though I think Doyle is on the right track in many respects, I judge that he makes an error in attributing the indeterminacy of the will to a set of causes ("noise"). By positing, in effect, a functionally deterministic proximal cause of indeterminacy, he simply pushes the perceived problem back a step and ends up offending Occam's razor in the process.

If we accept indeterminacy, it is simpler to just suppose that the will produces a different deliberate process for each hypothetical situation x. Doyle may object that the problem of randomness threatens the intelligibility of this simpler model. But on the one hand, it is not clear that Doyle's model provides satisfactory solution. And, more pointedly, I believe philosophers have largely handled chance incorrectly with respect to the indeterminate will.

How have philsophers mishandled chance with respect to the will? I will invoke Doyle's statement ""Chance cannot directly cause our actions" and imbue it with a slightly different meaning. I think it is exactly right that chance cannot directly cause our actions, apart from any consideration of consequences for free will. "Chance" is not an ontological entity. We identify "chance" from the results, not by careful examination of the cause. And "chance" results are exactly what we should expect when we use an indeterministic model to represent libertarian free will. Chance is not a bug. It is a feature.

Chance has traditionally been regarded as a bug largely due to the nature of the attacks on libertarian free will, which sometime suppose absurd events for the sake of illustration or, as Doyle notes, place chance causes in a problematic section of the decision making process.

Our intuitions about free will serve as a reliable guide in responding to the suggestion of absurd results. We intuitively do not regard such absurd results as examples of morally responsible decisions. We never have. Instead, we intuitively assert a type of "reasonable person" standard in assessing whether a choice qualifies as rational.

Yes, a person who tramples the petunias of a hated neighbor is acting rationally. And the same person under the same conditions also acts rationally if he does not trample the petunias because it is a moral wrong. There is no need to try to make absurd scenarios appear rational.

Richard Double pans libertarian free will

Philosopher Richard Double has some unkind words for libertarian free will:

(W)hy bother to deliberate if you are just as likely to opt for either of two contradictory alternatives?

One wonders how Double determined that either of two contradictory alternatives were just as likely. But I will offer an answer anyway. So that whichever one you pick, it will be a reasonable and considered decision.

For the libertarian, free agents not only have the ability to choose in two directions, but they must be in control of either choice. This consequence could be deduced from the demands of moral responsibility. If an agent is to be truly responsible for either choice, A or not A, then both outcomes are under the agent's control. The case is likewise with rationality, although a predictable amount of strain is likely to arise. Libertarians, at the very least, need to show how indeterministic choices can be rational whichever way they turn out. Ideally, libertarians will show us how such a dual ability might be, contrary to appearances, a desirable or even necessary element of rational choices.

I frankly don't understand what is so tough about it. Any number of examples might do, but I can stick with the one I fashioned for my series on free will skeptic Saul Smilansky: Mr. Brown can either trample his neighbor's petunias out of dislike for his neighbor, or refrain from doing so out of the belief that doing so would be morally wrong.

It seems to me that objections like Double's must spring from the notion that the deliberative process is the same while the eventual decision varies. People tend not to deliberate so much where the choice is clear.

Bob Doyle, the writer at "the Information Philosopher" answered in much the same way:

The simple answer to Kane's point and Double's is that we are not "just as likely" to opt for something different from "rational self control", but as human beings we can and do choose occasionally to be irrational.

Robert Kane's reservations about libertarian free will

At a terrific site for philosophy I just stumbled across, I found a long article on libertarian free will. The piece covers the views of quite a few philosophers, and in particular I was interested in Robert Kane's apparent concerns about libertarian free will.

Kane, after all, has produced one of the more robust models of libertarian free will.

There is, first of all, the problem of explaining why such a condition (an ability to do otherwise--ed.) should be regarded as necessary for free will at all.

I don't find that issue particularly distressing. It seems obvious to me that the ability to do otherwise, or the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, provides the freedom. Entity x with the ability to access outcomes A xor ~A ("xor" means either but not both) obviously has greater freedom than entity y with the ability to access only A. And that type or freedom ties into moral responsibility via agent causation and rational thought. But maybe it's trickier than it looks!

And, second, there is the problem of explaining how a theory of free will can accommodate a condition of this kind without making free choices arbitrary, capricious, and irrational.

Personal experience forces me to agree with Kane to the extent that skeptics of libertarian free will hold tightly to the notion that it much be capricious or irrational. The term I most often encounter is "random."

Some awkward consequences do seem to follow, If the agent might either make a choice or do otherwise, given all the same past circumstances, and the past circumstances include the entire psychological history of the agent, it would seem that no explanation in terms of the agent's psychological history, including prior character motives and deliberation, could account for the actual occurrence of one outcome rather than the other.

Kane's worry here reminds me of an objection lodged at the Center for Inquiry's message board. It was suggested that the conditions prior to a decision included all deliberations. Thus, if the deliberations suggested a leaning toward A, the outcome ~A would represent a disjunction between intention and outcome--or at least an disjunction between deliberation and the resulting intention. I consider that approach ridiculous, and Kane's statement seems to show an exaggerated deference to skeptics. I see no reason at all why alternative possibilities could not include deliberations of varying length and content. The initial conditions, after all, remain the same prior to any differences in the deliberation. The problem only arises, as I see it, if we allow an assumption of causal determinism to create an expectation that the deliberations must be identical stemming from the same initial conditions.

I can understand how the outcome of my deliberation may have been different, if I had known other facts, considered other consequences, imagined other scenarios, etc. But what I cannot understand is how I could have reasonably chosen to do otherwise, how I could have reasonably chosen B, given exactly the same prior deliberation that led me to choose A, the same information deployed, the same consequences considered, the same assessments made, and so on.

Mr. Kane, why not consider other consequences or scenarios? You are not causally determined to follow any one method of deliberation. Take an extra 10 seconds to ponder, if you like. Indeterminism certainly permits that.

This way of stating the argument shows what is at stake in the charges of arbitrariness, irrationality, etc., made against the indeterminist condition. If the choice of A was the reasonable outcome of my deliberation, then the choosing otherwise (the choice of B), which may have occurred given the same past circumstances, would have been "arbitrary," "capricious," "irrational," and "inexplicable," relative to my prior deliberation.

Yes, if the choice of A was the reasonable outcome then choosing B would appear capricious and inexplicable and all that. But many (most, I would think) scenarios include more than one reasonable option depending on the valuation placed on the various factors during deliberations. Following an example I gave during a critique of Saul Smilansky, Mr. Brown might trample his neighbor's petunias out of dislike for his neighbor. Or he might refrain from stomping the flowers based on his conviction that the action would be morally wrong. Either option is rational, and either might win out in deliberations.

Kane worries a bit too much.

*****

The article has Richard Double weighing in to amplify Kane's concerns, so I will have an excuse for another sequel.

Saul Smilansky: Libertarian free will is impossible, Pt. 3

In previous installments, we noted that Saul Smilansky's arguments against the coherence of libertarian free will amount to question begging. In part two, I even quoted Smilansky anticipating that objection from those who disagree with him. At the end of pt. 2 I ended with the commitment to look into Smilanksy's attempts to answer objections based on indeterminacy.

1) David Wiggins

Wiggins' objection is hardly worth treating, riddled as he is with doubts as to whether it even works. Smilansky presents Wiggins as belonging to the camp that attributes free will to a type of occurrence along the lines of quantum particle formation. I would call that position entirely wrong-headed if it places a "random" occurrence as the cause, in turn, of a responsible decision. That understanding of Wiggins leaves the "self" in a determined state.

2) Richard Sorabji

Sorabji's position appears far more interesting than Wiggins', and may end up being close to the one I favor. As Smilansky puts it:

While this model succeeds in limiting the range of possible actions to those produced by the agent's will, the agent cannot determine which action out of a few alternatives he will in fact take, and the result will be thus morally unsatisfactory.

I think I've shown that Smilansky's conclusion does not follow. If a given action may turn out A or ~A on a 50/50 basis, we cannot fix the outcome on the probability, as with "A occurred because A had a 50 percent chance of happening." That explains nothing. And if we rule out a prior causal chain, we are left only with the action of choosing (along with the corresponding outcome). And without a prior cause the only cause we can reasonably posit is the acting agent (the "self") its own self.

So, contrary to Smilansky, the outcome is under the control of the acting entity in a morally satisfactory way. And as I have illustrated earlier, the character of the acting entity likewise may be modeled as under the substantial control of that entity.

3) Robert Kane

Smilansky allows that Kane's model manifests considerable complexity, but offers a simplified version to facilitate discussion. Smilansky paraphrases Kane thus:

In the paradigmatic case a person is inclined in two irreconcilable directions, say, to do her duty and to advance her career. She is tempted by self-interest but makes an effort to do her duty, and 'chaotically amplified indeterminacies' in her brain, surrounding her 'self-network', play a role in bringing about the outcome. Since it is her will that is divided, any outcome will be her own, but because of the indeterminism it will not be causally determined.

Smilansky responds by asserting that Kane's model does not give us what we need in terms of the PSA. And his explanation amplifies the indications that his PSA serves as an assumption of determinism: "When reviewed objectively, this amounts to a suggestion that effort is the source of (e.g. moral) value, but any non-compatibilist 'freedom' expressed by it derives from a source beyond the agent's control, i.e. indeterminism."

But isn't that patently obvious to the point of tautology? Of course if we rule out indeterminism we are left only with compatibilist options.

To understand Kane, I think, Smilanksy needs to refrain from positing indeterminism as itself the cause of indeterminstic outcomes. It is indeterminism that allows differing outcomes to fall under the agent's control in the first place, which is the very thing that compatibilism can never offer. Recall that under determinism, identical conditions x always lead to one outcome regardless of the number of trials. Indeterminism is the result of the actions of the libertarian agent. Not the cause of the agent's actions. Though of course we never reach the varied results unless we refrain from assuming the truth of determinism.

I hope I've treated Smilansky fairly. It always represents a challenge to accurately capture the other person's meaning when coming from an opposite paradigm of understanding, and the language we use in the free will debate lends itself to fallacies of ambiguity.

That said, it appears as though Smilansky has overstated his case and failed to account for ways in which the libertarian model can answer every challenge he offers except the challenge to explain indeterminism in terms of determinism. That last challenge is illegitimate.


Saul Smilansky: Libertarian free will is impossible, Pt. 1
Saul Smilansky: Libertarian free will is impossible, Pt. 2

Saul Smilansky: Libertarian free will is impossible, Pt. 2

Shortly after posting my first critique of Smilansky's disproof of Libertarian Free Will, I ran across the book version of his argument. Google Books is awfully handy sometimes.

The argument is the book, as one might expect, provides more detail than the one he presents in the paper I critiqued. I should note that Smilansky emphasizes that his treatment of the issue in the book is also deliberately brief.

In this more developed account, Smilansky relies on the Principle of Sole Attribution, and he offers the following expression of the PSA:

Any feature F due to which a person deserves something S in the libertarian free will-dependent sense must, in the normatively relevant respects, be solely attributable to the person or to the pertinent aspect A of the person.

At first blush, the PSA seems like a human responsibility equivalent to the Principle of Sufficient Reason. The latter, I think, qualifies as corollary of causal determinism. As for the PSA, Smilansky states that "solely attributable" constitutes the key.

For now, it suffices to define it negatively, in that no one or nothing beyond the person's authorship and control can be allowed, in the normatively relevant way, to have brought forth F, if the latter is to be a source for desert in the libertarian sense.

As there may be hidden assumptions in the above, I would decline to agree pending additional information. If I naturally like the taste of salt and cannot help liking salt, I do not see why that would take away my responsibility for eating salty foodstuffs so long as other conditions for libertarian free will were met.

It turns out, at least apparently, that Smilansky obtains his view from libertarian advocates such as C. A. Campbell:

Campbell manifestly attempts to meet something like the criteria laid down by the PSA. He takes a limited aspect of a person, focused on a narrow concept of desire, and calls it 'character.' He then invokes the 'self' as a latent power, which in certain situations can cause us to act contrary to our 'character' (i.e. contrary to our strongest desire).

I call it a mistake to suppose that the self does not cause outcomes corresponding to the strongest desire. The point should be that the self acts as the cause significantly regardless of the strongest desire, as illustrated by modeling LFW for a single act such as consuming potato chips.

Suppose "Homer" is repeatedly put through a trial under conditions x where he may eat potato chips or not eat potato chips. It isn't that Homer eats the potato chips unless the self intervenes. It is that either option is caused by the self without in turn being absolutely caused by something other than the self. So if Homer eats the potato chips 99 times out of 100 it still does not follow that the outcome was caused by the desire to eat potato chips as opposed to the self.

My illustration points up the difficulty of separating the character from the particular leaning of the will (the self) in making the actual decision. I think Smilansky tends to view the character in terms of causal determinism, hence the conclusion that the self would have overruled the character in order to avoid eating potato chips. That is, eating potato chips would have been causally determined. Doing other than eating potato chips would be the indeterministic self. I think Smilansky fails to keep to indeterminism in forming his critique. If an event happens only 99 times out of 100 under identical conditions then all 100 trials are indeterministic, not just one of them. Determinism by definition requires all 100 trials to reach the same outcome. Claiming any number short of that as deterministic creates a contradiction.

The problem comes out clearly in Smilansky's book when he turns to E. Walter for explanation:

"Even if it were plausible to introduce a 'self' to explain behaviour, we would say (a) that the self's decisions are determined by the self's attributes and (b) the character of the substance 'self' is (at least partially) determined at the moment of its inception in accord with whatever laws relate to the nativity of such recondite beings ... We would have no reasonable explanation for how the self gets to be the way it is unless it derives its character potential at birth."
(ellipsis reflects my edit)

Beyond the fact that Walter looks inclined to impose determinism as the explanation for indeterminism, he apparently waves off probabilistic explanations, such as the one I offered above, with no consideration at all.

From there, Smilansky invokes the whole of a Galen Strawson argument that I have tried and found wanting.

Smilansky subsequently summarizes the argument in two parts and surprises me with his follow up:

At this stage it might be said that my argument for the incoherence of a worthwhile sense of self is begging the question; I introduce the requirement of determinism and then am "surprised" to find that libertarian free will cannot meet it.

Bingo! But Smilansky tries to argue that the requirement of determinism is in turn required by the argument of the LFW advocate: "(W)e have not required from the libertarian more than she must require from herself: an account must be given, as to which non-arbitrary factor brought about the decision or action, and why."

Not surprisingly, that argument is circular in its turn.

Smilansky seems to overlook the fact that the LFW paradigm explicitly and intentionally fixes the self as the type of arbiter that he apparently finds unsuitable. The decisions of an arbiter are, in fact, unavoidably arbitrary in an essential sense. Arbiters arbitrate.

Consider an example. Parson Brown realizes that it would be wrong to trample his neighbor's petunias. Yet he feels as though he would enjoy trampling the petunias just the same. Given that Brown knows it is wrong to trample the Petunias, how can he be morally responsible if he tramples them? That is the question Smilanksy seems to offer. Yes, it seems arbitrary for Brown to trample the Petunias when he knows better. But it is precisely his knowledge that stepping on the flowers is wrong that gives him his moral responsibility for his behavior should he trample them in fact.

Doubtless it may be argued that the desire to trample the petunias was too great to resist--but once we take that route we're right back begging the question of libertarian action. Where indeterminism applies in this specific instance, a temptation too great to resist is an impossibility.

Smilansky is correct that the self must have some sort of nature or character. However, he appears to err in the assumption that said nature is necessarily deterministic (at least to achieve personal responsibility), and in the assumption that the self could not control decisions that alter said nature.

*****


Smilansky takes up objections based on indeterminism in the next section of his book, so I will have reason to post a third part to this series.

Saul Smilansky: Libertarian free will is impossible, Pt 1
Saul Smilansky: Libertarian free will is impossible, Pt. 3

Saul Smilansky: Libertarian free will is impossible

On a lark, I went hunting for a claim that libertarian free will is impossible. And not just any claim. I am after the best arguments I can find. I found the claim readily enough from Saul Smilansky. Unfortunately, his argument owes a huge debt to that of Galen Stawson, which I have already addressed.

Still, there is no great harm in repeating the exercise. It always remains possible that some element in the explanation will either add to the earlier argument or add to my perception of that earlier argument.

So without further ado, Smilansky's brief presentation of the Strawsonesque argument:

The reason why libertarian free will is impossible, in a nutshell, is that the conditions required by an ethically satisfying sense of libertarian free will, which would give us anything beyond sophisticated formulations of compatibilism, are self-contradictory, hence cannot be met.

That sets forth Smilanksy's position, so he continues with the rationale:

This is so irrespective of determinism or causality. Attributing moral worth to a person for her action requires that it follow from what she is, morally. The action cannot be produced by a random occurrence and count morally. We might think that two different things can follow equally from a person, but which one does, say, a decision to steal or not to steal, again cannot be random but needs to follow from what she is, morally. But what a person is, morally, cannot be under her control. We might think that such control is possible if she creates herself, but then it is the early self that creates a later self, leading to vicious infinite regress.

The first key point:

"Attributing moral worth to a person for her action requires that it follow from what she is, morally."

I believe the LFW advocate should agree with this proposition, with the caveat that what a person "is" need not be the result of causal determinism. Smilanksy suggests that the argument hold regardless of "determinism or causality"--an odd thing to mention since the LFW position is an incompatibilist one. After all, if determinism is true, then we have reason to expect that LFW is impossible.

The second key point:

"The action cannot be produced by a random occurrence and count morally."

As with Strawson's argument, I detect a concept that requires some explanation. What is a "random" occurrence? A LFW model would (ironically) predict unpredictable outcomes except perhaps in terms of probabilities.

For example, suppose we were to model the decision to steal or not to steal according to LFW. LFW would suggest that an infinite number of trials under identical conditions would produce at least one trial unlike the others. If we have 999,999 trials where the subject steals and a single trial where the subject refrains from stealing, we can claim some element of "chance" in the outcome. But is the outcome random any more than the other 999,999?

On this point, I attempt to clarify the issue by distinguishing between random/chance cause and random/chance outcome. If Smilansky does not detect randomness by mapping outcomes then he appears to have it tucked into his assumptions--or else I should expect an explanation as to how he determined its presence.

Developed further, this idea turns into the notion that who the subject is may well amount to "an individual who steals under conditions x 999,999 times out of a million." This appears to satisfy the qualification that the cause of the outcomes was not random as well as the stipulation that the individual acted according to "what she is."

On to the third key point:

"But what a person is, morally, cannot be under her control."

We might well ask how that follows, and Smilansky obliges, albeit in brief:

We might think that such control is possible if she creates herself, but then it is the early self that creates a later self, leading to vicious infinite regress.

I think that both Strawson and Smilansky overlook the fairly elegant libertarian solution to the problem. Libertarians do not regard individuals as responsible for their own ultimate existence. However, libertarian models appear to allow an individual to create what a person is, morally, subsequent to being created.

For example, suppose we have "Alex," a newly created entity with a non-deterministic will. Alex has a 50/50 chance of stealing/not stealing under conditions x by default. That is how Alex was created, and we do not hold Alex responsible for that state. In addition, Alex has a 50/50 chance of choosing a morally superior lifestyle. If Alex chooses moral improvement, it increases the not stealing probability by one percentage point. The result? Alex is in at least partial control of having a 49/51 chance of stealing/not stealing, and in full control of having the 49/51 figure instead of 50/50. If this decision does not reflect personal responsibility, then at least the subsequent decision not to steal under conditions x does reflect personal responsibility.

If I'm correct, then Smilansky's third statement is simply false, and his argument fails.

I imagine that figures like Smilansky and Strawson do not view things this way because they have a tendency to model things in terms of determinism. There is a determined outcome and anything else has to be random and therefore beyond individual responsibility.


Saul Smilansky: Libertarian free will is impossible Pt. 2
Saul Smilansky: Libertarian free will is impossible Pt. 3

"In the Know": The East Anglia e-mail hack

Part of the "In the Know" series of posts.


The political right of the blogosphere quickly developed an awareness of a story concerning hacked e-mails from a major global warming research center.

The Climatic Research Center at the University of East Anglia (apparently misidentified in quite a few reports as the "Hadley" center) had its computer system hacked. Quite a few e-mails were snatched and posted on the Web. Some of the e-mail messages sound suspicious and appear to suggest that scientists at the center allowed politics to influence their presentation of science.

The Associated Press produced a story that sums up the gist of what happened and then goes on to add details.

The St. Petersburg Times ran the AP story, but edited out all of the specific details. The 16 paragraph story was cut down to the first four, though the Times version looks like five since one paragraph was made into two.

"In the Know," baby.