The U.S. and Syria - by Dia
demagogue on 17/9/2013 at 10:34
Quote Posted by faetal
But how does that apply to
where he used them?
I don't understand what you mean. According to the article I read at least, he used them at exactly where the rebel groups were most entrenched in the main cities -- because his legitimacy in part turns on maintaining control over all the area of main cities above all else, in the sense that pockets of lost control are most damaging to his legitimacy when they're in the cities & persistent (as opposed to pockets out in the countryside, or pockets where rebel control isn't so entrenched, where chemical weapons weren't used). So the logic of where he used the weapons was the easiest part to understand I thought.* I mean in the sense he wasn't using chemical weapons in just any random places, but with a logic to it, if a logic of desperation...
Unless you're asking: if you drew a map and circled the places in the main cities where the rebels were most persistently entrenched, and that's where chemical weapons were used; and now you're asking, what does these circled areas on the map have to do with
where chemical weapons were used... It kind of answers itself doesn't it? Because those places and not other places are where the chemical weapons were used, and this is the character of those places. But it's not like I've done personal field research there, so I can't say it has to be exactly this way since I'm just reciting what I recall reading...
* In the field of other questions you might ask, but for the record, the answers to other questions fit with the narrative too. Like why chemical weapons: because they root out the entire population indiscriminately; so even the civilian support base gets uprooted. Did he think there wouldn't be fallout or just not care if there was or wasn't? That article made the impression as if he's so desperate to maintain legitimacy & vacillates between nihilism & triumphalism that, in his nihilist spells, there's a case that he wouldn't care. Keep in mind in his narrative these people are terrorists, and there's already a deep tradition of torture against terrorists... So it's not like this is crossing some kind of line for the administration; only risking bringing it into the public.
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You assume people choose who to vote for because of campaign promises. Now this isn't my field, but my understanding of political science is that this simply isn't true.
On this, my undergrad thesis was analyzing the 1992 presidential election looking at the statistical data of voting returns by region, demographic group, and opinions (gender, income, religion, education, race, political opinions on various issues, etc, etc).
The punchline is that there are definite trends in voting patterns by demographic group which unsurprisingly have to do with that person's backgrounds or worldview... To take one example, like Catholics traditionally lean democratic, but in 1992 the tended to bail on Clinton in greater-than-usual numbers, the analysis (because they answer polls on the candidates) roughly being because of Clinton's "character" or moral shortcomings ... either they didn't vote, or some voted Republican, but there was also a spike of them voting for Perot, more than you'd expect, and definitely not because of Perot's platform, which wasn't particularly Catholic-friendly, but the analysis would probably go something like they were disillusioned by Clinton but weren't ready to vote Republican either, certainly not Bush, so they send a message of antagonism to both major parties by voting for Perot and, the best part, actually expecting him to lose & being ok with that.
So there are all sorts of reasons that go into why people vote the way they do that usually involve this kind of wild, tangled story of interests & values & experience.
A more important question maybe is why do policies end up the way they do. This is political action theory, the golden rule of which states that acute interests always trump diffuse interests in influencing political action. It's why industry lobbies have more influence over candidates, since a profit interest is very acute, over citizen consumer-interest groups, since something like consumer health or protection is a rather diffuse interest, even though millions of more people have it than are in the industry.
catbarf on 17/9/2013 at 22:20
Quote Posted by icemann
The quick answer is him being completely insane. To bomb your own people.
You know, I never really bought this argument, since it seems to come up again and again when talking about insurgents, Iran, North Korea, and all the other usual targets. Why would they do [x]? 'Because they're insane, so they don't have to make sense'. It sounds to me like a cop-out, a non-explanation, since it's really simple to just say the enemy isn't reasonable or rational and effectively write a logical blank check for anything that happens. It's also great for making people afraid; after all, what better way to get the public scared of, say, North Korea than the implication that their leaders are so unhinged, so nuts, that all it takes is for their coffee to be a tad weaker than normal and they'll go ballistic and push a big red button that says Nuke The West, heedless of the consequences.
Frankly, it sounds like a childish caricature of the world, like a bad Bond villain transplanted to the Middle East. Assad wouldn't order the gassing of his own civilians because he's 'completely insane'. With the UN keeping a watchful eye and the US asking very pointed questions about chemical weapons, gassing civilians would be the worst thing to do.
It seems, based on the evidence so far, that it was likely an element within the Syrian military that made a bad call, and now the Syrian government is trying to run damage control as quickly as possible to avoid a Western intervention. They may be a lot of things but insane isn't one of them. As for the rebels using it, well, multiple competing intelligence agencies seem quite sure that it was loyalist forces, and that's a lot better than what they said about Saddam having WMDs, so take that for what you will.
SubJeff on 17/9/2013 at 22:34
Well you have to go on the evidence. People might think they're doing things for good reason but if the only reason IS FOR THE HONOUR OF THE GLORIOUS LEADER then yeah, they're nuts.
Chade on 18/9/2013 at 12:10
Quote Posted by faetal
The difference is that the peer review part is executive. For example when the UK govt. sacked David Nutt because his assessment that most controlled drugs were less harmful than drugs and alcohol would not be permitted in a pure technocracy. Likewise, the privatisation of health care would also not be permitted. It's not about what is done now, it's about what could be done if the mechanism of government were changed to prioritise evidence over opinion and profitability.
So that's starting to get interesting. The obvious objection is that you are, presumably, giving executive power to quite a lot of largely unaccountable groups. From a purely practical point of view, it seems hard to imagine that this is going to decrease corruption. I think it would be harder to keep all the different groups under the microscope at all times, so to speak, and harder to do anything about it if you did believe they were operating corruptly (at least when you rely on the court of public opinion, a.k.a. democracy, there is no presumption of innocence!).
Now perhaps the requirement to issue well cited papers justifying decisions is going to help, but again, I see that as a mostly inconsequential feature of the system. I find it very hard to believe, for instance, that a conservative party could not release a well cited paper in favour of privatising health care if they had any strong reason to. They already do this sort of thing as it is, it's just not such a large part of the system because it's not directly required in order to govern.
(Plus even if you eliminated corruption you still have other practical problems such as the difficulty in setting overall policy objectives when government consists of a hundred independent strike groups each with their own individual mandate.)
Quote Posted by faetal
No, people vote for a number of stupid reasons, but the reason we call it democracy is that candidates publish their manifestos, so that is what allows it to be called democracy. I'm just saying that the non-binding nature of these manifestos nullifies even the claim of democracy. It's nothing more than a reality TV show, where the winners get to be the ones carrying out the wishes of the wealthy elite while pretending to serve the public.
But voters have a lot more then candidates' manifestos to go on. They've got their track record as well. You can lie about intentions easily enough, but you can't (so easily!) lie about your track record.
faetal on 18/9/2013 at 12:18
Now count of the fingers of one hand the nearest integer percentage of voters likely to do that, rather than just absorb the sound bites.
faetal on 18/9/2013 at 12:44
Quote Posted by Chade
So that's starting to get interesting. The obvious objection is that you are, presumably, giving executive power to quite a lot of largely unaccountable groups. From a purely practical point of view, it seems hard to imagine that this is going to decrease corruption. I think it would be harder to keep all the different groups under the microscope at all times, so to speak, and harder to do anything about it if you did believe they were operating corruptly (at least when you rely on the court of public opinion, a.k.a. democracy, there is no presumption of innocence!).
The thing with peer review is that it happens in two stages - the reviewing board for the publishing body (easy to corrupt) and the relevent expert community afterwards (very difficult to corrupt). So with a process which puts all methodology out in the open, it would be far harder to bend things to suit special interests, unless say certain thinking was couched in methodologies designed to be sever ball-ache to reproduce. Either way, it'd be a fuck load harder than what we have now, where politicians, civil servants etc are simply bribed or subverted by persistent lobbyists.
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Now perhaps the requirement to issue well cited papers justifying decisions is going to help, but again, I see that as a mostly inconsequential feature of the system. I find it very hard to believe, for instance, that a conservative party could not release a well cited paper in favour of privatising health care if they had any strong reason to. They already do this sort of thing as it is, it's just not such a large part of the system because it's not directly required in order to govern.
Similar comeback from the expert community. So long as the process if open and subject to rigour, it is less prone to being used for special interests. Also, think of Cochrane reviews and how they assign importance to a study based on its methodology before determining how much weight it carries. Of course then the reviewing body becomes targeted for corruption, but still, the comeback from the expert public ought to provide back-pressure.
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(Plus even if you eliminated corruption you still have other practical problems such as the difficulty in setting overall policy objectives when government consists of a hundred independent strike groups each with their own individual mandate.)
The biggest problem would be that the special interests would just use the media to turn the public against the experts. Most of Joe Public has no clue about and couldn't give a fuck about rigorous methodology and will be easily convinced by the likes of Rupert Murdoch that the experts were "elitists trying to gain power and screw everyone over" and it would be ridiculously easy to do.
Gryzemuis on 18/9/2013 at 14:30
Who decides who is an expert, and who isn't ?
Who decides to which field of expertise a certain problem belongs ? And thus which experts get to decide ?
When 50% says "here's the proof", and the other 50% says "that's no proof at all", who get to decide who is right ? What if it's 40-60 or 30-70 ? Science isn't democratic. The majority of scientists isn't right because they are the majority.
I used to work in a narrow field of technology. I knew many of the experts in the field. Once you got to know them, half of them were pretty clueless. They were there only because they had been in the field for 10+ years, before the technology had become relevant and booming. Or they were seen as experts, because they were very loud (also called "active") and everybody knew their name. And then there are the experts who understand the problems very well, but lack the creativity (or balls) to come up with anything new, productive or creative.
I don't give a rat's ass about the opinions of experts.
faetal on 18/9/2013 at 14:42
Consensus. It's not about opinions, it's about findings and analysis. You want a social policy which does X, you don't get some populist idiot saying something catchy, you want research which looks at how different variables have their impact.
Case in point: austerity as a response to financial crises - governments were repeatedly warned by economists that it would make matters worse and slow down recovery, but e.g. the UK government went ahead with it anyway. Lo and behold, the economy slowed right down and we've only started showing a tiny bit of recovery now, around 3 years after most economists would have predicted normal post-recession recovery to start kicking in. Expert consensus would have prevented that.
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When 50% says "here's the proof", and the other 50% says "that's no proof at all"
This is daft - it's not about what people
want to say, it's about what the information tells us. Academics don't just make discoveries up out of thin air and opinions - you have to interrogate existing knowledge, find something which requires an explanation, find rigorous ways to test it and then see what those tests say. What you're talking about above actually resembles the way political parties appear way more than e.g. science does.
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I knew many of the experts in the field. Once you got to know them, half of them were pretty clueless.
Therefore all expert opinion is invalid? I work in an expert field now and most of the people I work with are pretty fucking clued in when it comes to their subject area. Plus, overall consensus after publication tends to smooth off a lot of the rough edges. When it comes to politics, it's just charismatic people in suits promising things you want to hear while thinking up more creative ways to fuck you.
It sounds like your experience with experts was not good, but I'm guessing the loud opinions of those experts weren't subject to peer review. Not forgetting that published work doesn't make it through the reviewing process if it is just opinions - it has to be referenced when making claims about precedents and has to be evidenced by data and methodology when making claims about anything new. The experts you seem to be talking about are people who think of themselves as experts. In academia, you can't just claim that shit, you need published work to back it up and that work needs to make it through peer review. It's not perfect, but it's a shit-tonne better than any alternative I can think of.
What are the checks and balances we get from politicians? We can move them around a bit every 4 or so years, but the result tends to be the same.
Gryzemuis on 18/9/2013 at 15:05
I fully agree that the current political system isn't working as it should. Not at all. I am the most cynical guy you'll ever meet, when it comes to politics.
But your system wouldn't work for long either. Suddenly all politicians become scientists. And they will write a zillion papers. And they will peer-review each others papers. And lobbyists will become scientists too and write more papers (oh wait, they already do that today). And the honorful scientists will suddenly feel a lot more pressure from outside sources (like the people paying for their research). Within a short amount of time, your nice area of research will be polluted beyond any recognition.
Quote Posted by faetal
Therefore all expert opinion is invalid?
No. But the problem is to decide which experts have valid opinions. Even if you know who to trust, that does not mean people in general will agree on who to trust.
Can we know what your area of expertise is ? (I think you wrote about it on this forum before, but I can't find it). Is it an area that just does research ? Or does it also create/build stuff ? I think this matters a lot in how much trust you have in science.
Example. I find the academic field of economic science very interesting. I am sure they can describe everything that happens in the economy, at financial institutions, between countries. But I think they can't predict *anything*. Because it's too complex. And because people's direct interests are at stake. Economic science is something different than doing research about bacteria. Having economist decide about economy would be just as a big a clusterfuck as having toddlers in kindergarten make the decisions.
faetal on 18/9/2013 at 15:30
Quote Posted by LittleFlower
I fully agree that the current political system isn't working as it should. Not at all. I am the most cynical guy you'll ever meet, when it comes to politics.
But your system wouldn't work for long either. Suddenly all politicians become scientists. And they will write a zillion papers. And they will peer-review each others papers. And lobbyists will become scientists too and write more papers (oh wait, they already do that today). And the honorful scientists will suddenly feel a lot more pressure from outside sources (like the people paying for their research). Within a short amount of time, your nice area of research will be polluted beyond any recognition.
I'm not sure how they all be able to produce rigorous data using methodologies which correctly challenge the research question and hold up to proper analysis. This is how e.g. alternative medicine doesn't have any weight in terms of its research - there are tonned of dodgy papers out there written and researched by alt medicine weirdos, but the methodologies are so flawed (e.g. small sample sizes, improper blinding, insufficient controls etc..) that the weight those papers carry means they don't win out against the research which is properly executed and contradicts it. I think your notion that anyone can research anything they want and it will all carry equal weight is flawed. Think of e.g. climate change. Indeed, the energy industry pours millions into funding science which refutes climate change, but the scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change exists is greater than 95% despite this.
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No. But the problem is to decide which experts have valid opinions. Even if you know who to trust, that does not mean people in general will agree on who to trust.
That was my problem mentioned above - the layperson intrinsically doesn't like the notion that someone knows better than they do with something that affects them. The media would play on this and thus it could never work. Which is a shame, as I believe it could provide a genuinely better system.
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Can we know what your area of expertise is ? (I think you wrote about it on this forum before, but I can't find it). Is it an area that just does research ? Or does it also create/build stuff ? I think this matters a lot in how much trust you have in science.
My area of research is immunotoxicology, hence if I became accomplished enough, that is the type of thing I'd be on reviewing boards for. That said, if I read an immunology paper and I know that a claim being made is either refuted elsewhere by more solid research, or their methodology is not an effective means of achieving the result they claim - I can write a letter to the journal it was published in and my letter would be published and the authors would be expected to make a public response. If I had picked them up on a genuine hole in their research, then work would be undertaken to rectify and a modified version of the paper, or an addendum would need to be published. Whereas a politician says "we made a mistake" and the following week it is forgotten about.
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Example. I find the academic field of economic science very interesting. I am sure they can describe everything that happens in the economy, at financial institutions, between countries. But I think they can't predict *anything*. Because it's too complex. And because people's direct interests are at stake. Economic science is something different than doing research about bacteria. Having economist decide about economy would be just as a big a clusterfuck as having toddlers in kindergarten make the decisions.
That's not quite right. They can't predict
everything, but a lot can be predicted because of how some things react in response to specific stimuli. If you cut public spending, it slows the movement of money in general due to large numbers of people falling below means thresholds - this means that economy will follow natural cycles (such as recovery from recession) much more slowly. It's also worth noting that the current UK government in 5 years has increased the deficit nearly 3 times as much as the previous government did in 13 years, so cutting social spending didn't even save money, probably due to all of the extra bureaucracy created by installing austerity measures. Also, it wasn't
an economist, it was many economists and what they were saying stuck to very basic economic theory about provision of stimulus when an economy slows down, not removing it.
