Deinonychus antirrhopus

Government Funded Health Care

I don't really expect any of those who advocate government funded health care to tackle the problem we see here.

The parents of Charlotte Wyatt have been told that doctors are to be allowed to let their profoundly ill baby daughter die if they feel it is in her best interests.

A High Court judge yesterday lifted a previous ruling that she should always be resuscitated, on the grounds that the two-year-old was now on a "downward rather than an upward trend". Mr Justice Hedley heard an emergency application from doctors treating her that she had developed an aggressive chest infection and was unlikely to survive any moves to keep her alive. "Medical evidence speaks with one voice, that ventilation simply will not achieve the end for which no doubt the parents would wish," he said.

Charlotte's condition was said to be "deteriorating" last night. Her mother, Debbie, 24, from Portsmouth, still believes that if her daughter were ventilated she would recover. But Mr Justice Hedley said there had been a "very significant deterioration in Charlotte's condition". It is the fifth time he has had to make a ruling about Charlotte's treatment.

Doctors at St Mary's Hospital, Portsmouth, had previously argued that her life was so intolerable that if her condition worsened they should be allowed to withhold treatment. Charlotte suffers from severe lung, brain and kidney damage. But her condition improved so much that last October the judge removed a ruling allowing doctors to let her die.

This, in my view, is precisely what happens when the government takes over funding anything: they get to set the limits. Think of what would happen if this were not so. There would be no limit on what is spent on even hopeless cases if the parents/spouse/loved ones made the decisions. We've seen something like this in Canada, Australia, and parts of Europe with regards to in vitro fertilization (IVF).

Poole is typical of the growing number of midlife women coming to U.S. infertility clinics to get pregnant with donated eggs implanted with in vitro fertilization (IVF). The women are mainly from Canada, Australia and parts of Europe, where tough laws forbid the payment of egg donors and limit those seeking to become pregnant to using eggs from a young friend or family member or from a small pool of unpaid donors. Waiting periods of several years are not uncommon.

This is an ingenuous method for controlling health care costs. IVF if not a cheap procedure, and by making the payment of eggs illegal it forces people to look outside their country. This effectively kills most of the demand and contains costs and as an added bonus politicians can hide behind noble sounding rhetoric.

Similar things could happen with prescription drugs. Since the government is paying for the drugs, who cares how much it costs. Expenditures spiral out of control, the government responds in its typical ham fisted manner and does something like price controls and there you have no more new wonder drugs as drug companies are no longer able to reap the rewards for all of their expenditures.

I don't expect these kinds of stories to have any impact on those who adavocate some sort of government provided health care. Sitting down and looking at problems like these are not something they want to do.

Why Evolutionary Game Theory?

I came across this nifty page on evolutionary game theory and the entry on the problem of hyperrational agents caught my interest.

The traditional theory of games imposes a very high rationality requirement upon agents. This requirement originates in the development of the theory of utility which provides game theory's underpinnings (see Luce (1950) for an introduction). For example, in order to be able to assign a cardinal utility function to individual agents, one typically assumes that each agent has a well-defined, consistent set of preferences over the set of "lotteries" over the outcomes which may result from individual choice. Since the number of different lotteries over outcomes is uncountably infinite, this requires each agent to have a well-defined, consistent set of uncountably infinitely many preferences.

Numerous results from experimental economics have shown that these strong rationality assumptions do not describe the behavior of real human subjects. Humans are rarely (if ever) the hyperrational agents described by traditional game theory. For example, it is not uncommon for people, in experimental situations, to indicate that they prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. These "failures of the transitivity of preference" would not occur if people had a well-defined consistent set of preferences. Furthermore, experiments with a class of games known as a "beauty pageant" show, quite dramatically, the failure of common knowledge assumptions typically invoked to solve games.^6] Since evolutionary game theory successfully explains the predominance of certain behaviors of insects and animals, where strong rationality assumptions clearly fail, this suggests that rationality is not as central to game theoretic analyses as previously thought. The hope, then, is that evolutionary game theory may meet with greater success in describing and predicting the choices of human subjects, since it is better equipped to handle the appropriate weaker rationality assumptions.

Basically there are two points here.

First is that humans, while generally rational, frequently fail to meet the strict criteria for being rational in the sense of game theory. We can see this with such things as the Allais Paradox, the Ellsberg Paradox, as well as other experimental game theory results. Sometimes people just don't conform to the level of rationality that game theory has often invoked.

Second, when it comes to things like insects or animals where there is very little or no rationality game theory has been helpful. This suggests a possible solution to the problem posed above.

Scientific Theories and God

In the comments to this post on Paul Nelson and his misleading description of some research in the magazine Science are some comments by Joshua Bozeman. Joshua also has a blog and his current top post is a hoot. For those of you too lazy to click through the post is entitled, "Well Sure God Can Be Part of This Theory!" Neat title, but sadly not at all true.

The problem is that when you have something supernatural, be it God or even angels or some other entity it stops science dead in its tracks. You see, scientists evaluate a scientific theory on its ability to explain the data. Or more accurately scientists look at the probabilities,

Prob(H_i|E) for each i,

Where H_i is the i^th hypothesis, and E is the evidence in hand. If one of your hypotheses is that God, an omnipotent being, came along and did them, then it defeats all other hypotheses all the time. This is true for any and all scientific hypotheses. The only way out of this problem is to put constraints on what God can and can't do, which is something that most religious people are reluctant to do. So right off the bat with the title Joshua is off to a bad start.

He continues off the rails when he makes use of a dubious debating technique and logical fallacy of ambiguity. For example, Joshua writes,

They [Darwinists] claim that anyone who thinks God created life is a creationist, then they say creationism is nonsense and wrong- thus, the only logical conclusion is- life isn’t the result of God- and when you get to this point, it’s hard to posit ANY God at all…so you’re in a position where you’re basically assuring believers that the idea doesn’t kill the idea of God, yet in reality it does just that…

Basically there is nothing that is literally wrong with the above, but Joshua is using the words "creationist/creationism" in two different ways. First, yes if you believe that God created life you are a creationist. But the creationism that Joshua references is the views that are expressed by those who claim Creationism is scientific and want to include God in their scientific thoeries. There is not an identity between the two terms. There are creationists like Kenneth Miller who is a biologist and also a "Darwinist" yet who is also a firm believer in God. There is my friend Kent who I know is quite devout in his beliefs of God, and yet he rejects the current Creationist "science" upto and including ID as promulgated by the Discovery Institute. Clealry there is a logical problem and it is Joshua's. He is trying to imply an identity between the two terms when clearly there is no such identity. The two terms quite definitely overlap, but they are not identical.

Joshua has also made assertions that I've put words in Paul Nelson's mouth. But here is Joshua at the very least doing the very same thing, but on a far grander scale,

Problem is- if they call anyone who believes God created the first life a “creationist” and then say that ID is creationism- and then attack ID as bogus…what they’re really doing is saying that, in fact, God doea NOT exist.

The reason this is putting words in the mouths of all Darwinists is the logical fallacy that is hidden in Joshua's post. Once we note that there is not an identity between the terms creation/creationist and that not all creationists are alike his argument falls apart. I am willing to bet that Eugenie Scott has no problems with Kenneth Miller's beliefs in God and creationism. My guess is that it rests on the fact that Prof. Miller knows that his beliefs in God are not scientific and hence the scientific research of others pose no danger to those views.

The Fine Art of Quote-Mining

Paul Nelson is a Discovery Institute Fellow and is a proponent of Intelligent Design (ID). He also has a reputation for being one of the more forthright of the ID proponents out there. However, I read his recent post at ID the Future about an article by Professors Eric Davidson and Douglas Erwin that shows the same dishonest quote mining we have seen from other IDers. Nelson provides some lengthy quotes from the article,

Classic evolutionary theory, based on selection of small incremental changes, has sought explanations by extrapolation from observed patterns of adaptation. Macroevolutionary theories have largely invoked multi-level selection, among species and among clades. But neither class of explanation provides an explanation of evolution in terms of mechanistic changes in the genetic regulatory program for development of the body plan, where it must lie. (p. 796)

And

Current microevolutionary thinking assumes that observed types of genetic change (from single base substitutions to gene duplications) are sufficient to explain all evolutionary events, past and present....But attempting to explain an aspect of animal evolution that depends on one kind of network alteration [deep changes] by adducing evidence from an aspect that depends on another [shallow changes] can be fundamentally misleading. (p. 800)

What does this say? Well Davidson and Erwin are looking at the stability of body plans at the phyla level. They note that such body plans are remarkably stable and they also note that interference with the expression of any one of the “kernel” genes will destroy kernel function. What is the “kernel”? From my reading of the article in Science, a kernel is a highly conserved developmentally important subcircuit of a larger whole complex gene regulatory network that controls for body parts and plan. Davidson and Erwin note that the kernel is inflexible and hence are not going to change via classic neo-Darwinian mechanisms.

Now, one could look at these quotes and my additional explanation and conclude that the kernel is irreducibly complex (IC), that is removal of any single part (or preventing the expression of any of the kernel genes) destroys the function of the structure we are examining. There are two problems with this view. The first is described in this post by PZ Myers about how IC structures can evolve via your standard neo-Darwinian mechanisms. The second highlights the dishonesty of Paul Nelson. While Davidson and Erwin argue that classic neo-Darwinian mechanisms are not sufficient for the evolution of new body plans, they don’t argue that the body plans evolved via non-neo-Darwinian mechanisms. In fact, they argue precisely the opposite in the very same article that Nelson is pointing too.

It would follow that these kernels must have been assembled during the initial diversification of the Bilateria and have retained their internal character since. Critically, these kernels would have formed through the same processes of evolution as affect the other components, but once formed and operating to specify particular body parts, they would have become refractory to subsequent change.--emphasis added

What this means is that the kernels initially arose via the same mechanisms that created all other biological components. Only a dishonest or superficial reading the paper would lead one to believe that ID played any role in the process. Further, the claim that neo-Darwinism doesn’t work for the pre-Cambrian is also suspect. Maybe it is correct, but that wasn’t the focus of Davidson and Erwin’s article. Further, while the process that Davidson and Erwin had in mind for the development of the kernels and other biological components may not be neo-Darwinian it certainly isn’t some supernatural designer.

As for Davidson’s comment about neo-Darwinism being dead, that quote is also quite suspicious in that it is completely stripped of its context. The bottom line is that when you read anything by an IDer one should look at what is quoted and what was not quoted. This also highlights another level of dishonesty among the IDers in general. The new refrain from the ID camp is to “teach the controversy” and that there is this dogmatism amongst scientists in regards to neo-Darwinism. But right here we see what might become the beginnings of a controversy. Davidson and Erwin are suggesting a rather controversial hypothesis (at least it appears controversial to this layperson). Of course, this isn’t the kind of controversy they are talking about. I wonder why? Probably because it doesn’t invoke the supernatural. Bottom line, you can’t trust these guys to give you an accurate picture of whatever they are talking about.

Update: See also PZ Myer's post for a more detailed look at the science.

Liberal Intelligent Design

After reading this nonsensical screed I am dumbfounded. There are only three choices here:

1. Galbraith is a complete idiot.
2. Galbraith is completely ignorant of intelligent design and its implications for economics.
3. Both 1 and 2.

First off, Galbraith gets it totally and completely wrong when he asserts that evolutionary theory has to be Godless,

Darwin didn't invent evolution. He invented Godless Evolution. Menand writes: "On the Origin of Species was published on November 24, 1859. The word 'evolution' barely appears in it. Many scientists by 1859 were evolutionists—that is, they believed that species had not been created once and for all, but had changed over time…. The purpose of On the Origin of Species was not to introduce the concept of evolution; it was to debunk the concept of supernatural intelligence—the idea that the universe is the result of an idea."

Galbraith goes on to site this author, Menand, that the big deal was materialism. Here Galbraith is deploying the very tactics of the Creationists he seems to despise (you can't make up irony like this), that is conflating methodological materialism (i.e. in science answers are only looked for in terms of nature) with philosophical materialism (i.e. there is only nature and God does not exist).

I'd be willing to bet that most scientists follow the idea of methodological naturalism in that they do their research looking for natural causes to the phenomena that they study. It is possible for one to belive in both methodological naturalism and not believe in philosophical naturalism. Somebody who believes that God created the universe and then did not interfere would fit into this mold. On virtually every aspect of science such a person would be in 100% agreement with somebody who was a philosophical naturalist in terms of how the world works.

From this horrendous and misleading begining things go rapidly down hill. Galbraith assets that all economists are intelligent designers. Why? Well because Adam Smith was a deist. Let me see...all rapists are men. James K. Galbraith is a man, therefore James K. Galbraith is a rapist. Cool how that illogical type of thinking works, isn't it?

While it is technically true that Smith is an IDer (proponent of intelligent design) in a trivial sense, after all God did design the universe, then sat back and didn't fiddle with it, it isn't quite what the current crop of IDers are about. This kind of intentional and sloppy misuse of words only highlights that Galbraith has about as much intellectual honesty as a turd. The problem is that it is problably more apt to use the term IDer to describe people like Galbraith.

Consider what the current IDer believs:

• God created the universe and life in it.
• God pretty much lets evolution take care of things.
• But every now and then God intervenes to do something like create the bacterial flagella (loosely speaking).

Now consider an economist like Galbraith and what he believes,

• Markets form spontaneously--much like God spontaneoulsy forming the universe.
• Economists like Galbraith think the market does okay.
• Periodically economists like Galbraith think they can intervene (via the government) to do certain things.

Galbraith even writes,

Smith's Creator did not interfere. He simply wrote the laws and left them for events to demonstrate and man to discover.

This is where Glabraith effectively disembowels his entire argument with 21 words. Everything else that Galbraith has to write after this becomes meaningless pap. However, lets keep looking,

The greatest American economist, Thorstein Veblen, observed that "the guidance of…the invisible hand takes place…through a comprehensive scheme of contrivances established from the beginning." What is this if not Intelligent Design?

Ugg...Veblen. Great economist...well maybe if one were drunk one might think that. No. Veblen is completely wrong. The invisible hand does not work through contivances established long, long ago. Veblen is talking about institutions and unfortuantely for both Veblen and Galbraith institutions evolve. The legal environment we have today is quite different that what was in place 100 years ago. The internet didn't exist 100 years ago. Even government is radically different than the government of 1906. Even a 12 year old would know this, but not an economist like Galbraith.

Economics could become a science, but only if it detached itself from the idea that change intrinsically led to improvement.

Kerrr-what? Jesus, did he just write that? I'd like to see any economics text book form the past 100 years where such and assertion was made. Of course, change is not by definition good. Talk about building a flimsy strawman to knock down.

More than a century later, economics has not escaped its pre-Darwinian rut. Economists still don't understand variation; instead they write maddeningly about "representative agents" and "rational economic man." They still teach the "marginal product theory of wages," which excuses every gross inequality faced by the laboring poor.

Right, which is why evolutionary game theory is not important in economics....oh wait...nevermind.

Galbraith's entire economic philosophy is one where the economy can be "fine tuned". Where have we heard that term before? From IDers who argue that the universe is "fine tuned" and that things like the bacterial flagellum is also fine tuned to such an extent that evolution is impossible.

Think about regulations and laws that are specifically designed to achieve some economic outcome. How often are they successful? Not very. Why? Becuase the market place and the economy changes in response to changes in its environment. When the government enacts a regulation the firm doesn't merely have to do what the regulation says, it can also look for a way around it. Similarly for consumers.

Here is an interesting blog post by Tara Smith on some of the potential problems with tinkering with biological systems. Can we learn something from that about the economy? I think so. We should be very careful in implementing regulations and trying to set economic policy. Bad economic policy, even if one's intentions are good, can have disasterous effects. Look at the Great Depression. At the time the consensus view was that if the government could just get its budget balanced things would start to get better. But they didn't want to cut spending, and tax revenues were falling, so what to do....? Raise taxes at the moment the U.S. is heading into a recession. Sound like a smart move? No. Today we know better.

This notion that economists are closet IDers is perposterous. Some clearly they are, but it generally aren't the ones on the "Right". For instance if we were to look at the Austrians and anarcho-capitalists we'd find economists with views that are more in line with evolutionary processes than your standard Keynsian such as Galbraith.

In fact, I'd say that if anything the ID of people like Galbraith is worse in some ways than the ID of Dembski, Behe, et. al. In the latter case they are weak, ineffectual and in the minority. Further, their viewpoint is not prevelant in science and science classrooms. The impact is minimal (but could be bad if they were to succeed). On the other hand those who favor discretionary policy and intervention in the economy are in the dominant position. Everybody looks to the President, Congress and the government in general when things go wrong economically. So they set policies to try to solve these problems. But unlike the religious IDers the Bureaucratic Designer is not omniscient nor even necessarily benevolent.

Galbraith has it exactly backwards. At least with his foolish attempt to paint free market economists as some sort of religious fundamentalists. If anything it is economists like Galbraith that is the religious fundamentalist. The only problem is that he has set himself and those economists who share his views as false gods.

The State of the Union: Republicans are Democrats Now

Well, after listening to part of the State of the Union and reading the transcript that is my conclusion, that the difference between Democrats and Republicans is of measure zero. When Bush's ideas of fiscal responsibility is this,

This year my budget will cut it again and reduce or eliminate more than 140 programs that are performing poorly or not fulfilling essential priorities.

By passing these reforms, we will save the American taxpayer another $14 billion next year and stay on track to cut the deficit in half by 2009.

Factor in things like the massive increase in spending for No Child Left behind, the Medicare prescription drug program and other spending and it is obvious that Bush and his cronies are anything but fiscal conservatives. They have turned the very concept on its head. If they are fiscal conservatives then Bill Clinton was a downright miser.

The retirement of the baby boom generation will put unprecedented strains on the federal government. By 2030, spending for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid alone will be almost 60 percent of the entire federal budget.

Yeah, and lets forget that this president has put in place a prescription drug program for Medicare that will cost untold trillions over the coming decades. Yeah, he sure is getting serious about the Social Security and Medicare shortfall...why if he gets any more serious we wont have a country left to worry about.

President Bush has, rightfully in my view, noted that there is a good chance that if nothing is done aobut Medicare and Social Security that we will face,

staggering tax increases, immense deficits or deep cuts in every category of spending.

Of course thinking about this situation before pushing the prescription drug program through Congress might have been the better course. But there seems to be one thing Bush loves and that is lots of spending.

And Bush's comments about free trade are simply pathetic. Excuse me, but isn't this the President who enacted protectionist policies in regards to steel and shrimp? Gotta try and pander to new constituencies I guess, while still offering empty rhetoric to the old constituencies.

And the addicted to oil comment makes me grit my teeth at such an inapt analogy. We are not addicted, it is simply the cheapest form of energy there is right now. As such we consume it in large quantities. If we are addicted to oil, then we are addicted to oxygen and food as well. Stupid analogy.

And while it is good to have more research into alternatives since oil will not be the primary fuel source for ever and it will get more and more expensive as there is less and less of it, but why must the government do it? Why not private industry? Private industry is working on things like hybrid cars (granted they still aren't at a point where the are ready for wide spread use). As the price of oil (and the derivative products like gasoline) looking for a viable alternative becomes more and more desirable.

Fruther, when the government takes tax dollars to do this kind of research it can have less than desirable outcomes. From a theoretical stand point because taxes are now higher, there is less money for investing in R&D for alternatives to oil. Since the only research is now being done by the government which is subject to political wheeling and dealing, the type of research isn't going to be guided by realities such as what is most likely to turn a profit (i.e., result in a viable product), but instead by what pleases political expediency. Not exactly what I'd call the best way to find a solution.

The part about encouraging children to take more math and science was quite ironic for me. I suppose it depends on what kind of science we are talking about. Real science that includes evolutionary theory, or Bush's preferred psuedo-science that teaches Intelligent Design. And Bush's proposed policies sound just like something I'd expect from a Democrat. "We'll fling money at this problem and train lots of teachers...but we wont do anything about bad parents." After all, you can have great teachers, a state of the art school, and still get crap results if the students and their parents don't put in the effort to learn. Getting a child to learn is not merely trundling them off to a warehouse every day, but also sitting down and helping them with their homework, going over their homework to look for errors, and to explain various concepts to them when they are having difficulty.

This is what happens when you subsidize personal decisions. People make decisions based on the (marginal) beneft and (marginal) cost. They will keep doing something so long as the (marginal) benefit exceeds the (marginal) cost. Reduce the (marginal) cost and they will do more of it. This applies to child bearing decisions and public school. Since the costs are not borne entirely and directly by the parents, they will end up having more children. Might this result in people having children before they are fully ready to have children? Could this in turn result in parents who don't take the time to ensure that their children succeed at school? Nope, we'll just train 100,000 more teachers or whatever and fling money at the problem.

I have to say, each year no matter who is giving the State of the Union speech I just can't help that we are moving more and more towards a nanny-state. Reagan's notion of limited government is completely dead IMO.

Also check out Jerry Taylor's take on Bush's new energy policy proposals: old wine in new bottles.

As far as the new subsidies for coal, wind, solar, nuclear, and ethanol energy are concerned, if those technologies have economic merit, no subsidy is necessary. If they don't, then no subsidy will provide it. Those subsidies have failed to produce economic energy in the past and there is little reason to expect that they will do so in the future.

Quite right.