Argumentation in public health policy

Published by peter on 2009-08-03 in Argumentation, Consumer Behaviour, Culture, Decision theory, Game theory, Intelligence and Espionage and Science. 0 Comments

While on the subject of public health policy making under conditions of ignorance, linguist Louise Cummings has recently published an interesting article about the logical fallacies used in the UK debate about possible human variants of mad-cow disease just over a decade ago (Cummings 2009). Two fallacies were common in the scientific and public debates of the time (italics in orginal):
An Argument from Ignorance:

FROM: There is no evidence that BSE in cattle causes CJD in humans.
CONCLUDE: BSE in cattle does not cause CJD in humans.

An Argument from Analogy:

FROM: BSE is similar to scrapie in certain respects.
AND: Scrapie has not transmitted to humans.
CONCLUDE: BSE will not transmit to humans.

Cummings argues that such arguments were justified for science policy, since the two presumptive conclusions adopted acted to guide the direction and prioritisation of subsequent scientific research efforts. These presumptive conclusions did so despite both being defeasible, and despite, in fact, both being subsequently defeated by the scientific research they invoked. This is a very interesting viewpoint, with much to commend it as a way to construe (and to reconstrue) the dynamics of scientific epistemology using argumentation. It would be nice to combine such an approach with Marcello Pera’s 3-person model of scientific progress (Pera 1994), the persons being: the Investigator, the Scientific Community, and Nature.
Some might be tempted to also believe that these arguments were justified in public health policy terms – for example, in calming a nervous public over fears regarding possible BSE in humans. However, because British public policy makers did in fact do just this and because the presumptive conclusions were subsequently defeated (ie, shown to be false), the long-term effect has been to make the great British public extremely suspicious of any similar official pronouncements. The rise in parents refusing the triple MMR vaccine for their children is a direct consequence of the false assurances we were given by British health ministers about the safety of eating beef. An argumentation-based theory of dynamic epistemology in public policy would therefore need to include some game theory. There’s also a close connection to be made to the analysis of the effects of propaganda and counter-propaganda (as in George 1959), and of intelligence and counter-intelligence.
References:
Louise Cummings [2009]: Emerging infectious diseases: coping with uncertainty. Argumentation, 23 (2): 171-188.
Alexander L. George [1959]: Propaganda Analysis: A Study of Inferences Made from Nazi Propaganda in World War II. (Evanston, IL, USA: Row, Peterson and Company).
Marcello Pera [1994]: The Discourses of Science. (Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press).

Computers in conflict

Published by peter on 2009-08-03 in AI, Argumentation, Books, Computer technology, Decision theory and Rhetoric. 0 Comments

ArgAIBook
Academic publishers Springer have just released a new book on Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence. From the blurb:

This volume is a systematic, expansive presentation of the major achievements in the intersection between two fields of inquiry: Argumentation Theory and Artificial Intelligence. Contributions from international researchers who have helped shape this dynamic area offer a progressive development of intuitions, ideas and techniques, from philosophical backgrounds, to abstract argument systems, to computing arguments, to the appearance of applications producing innovative results. Each chapter features extensive examples to ensure that readers develop the right intuitions before they move from one topic to another.
In particular, the book exhibits an overview of key concepts in Argumentation Theory and of formal models of Argumentation in AI. After laying a strong foundation by covering the fundamentals of argumentation and formal argument modeling, the book expands its focus to more specialized topics, such as algorithmic issues, argumentation in multi-agent systems, and strategic aspects of argumentation. Finally, as a coda, the book explores some practical applications of argumentation in AI and applications of AI in argumentation.”

References:
Previous posts on argumentation can be found here.
Iyad Rahwan and Guillermo R. Simari (Editors) [2009]: Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence. Berlin, Germa ny Springer.

Epistemic modal logic at the CIA

Published by peter on 2009-07-01 in Decision theory, Intelligence and Espionage and Uncertainty. 0 Comments

A recent issue of the TLS ran a review by Terence Hawkes of the biography by Michael Holzman of Jim Angleton, head of counter-intelligence at the CIA. Holzman’s book, although mostly written from secondary sources, is a fine summary of Angleton’s life and career.  It is marred, however, by (a) Holzman’s annoying (academic) habit of quoting something or somebody and then repeating, verbatim, key words from that very quotation in the following paragraph, as if we readers were idiots, unable to read for ourselves or contemplate an idea for longer than a paragraph. And, (b) by a casual sloppiness about dates. Call me old-fashioned, but I think a historian should not simply say “in May that year” when the last mention of the specific year was some tens of pages and several anecdotes or set-pieces back. No doubt Holzman always knows which of the 71 years of Angleton’s life and the various ones before or since he is currently referring to, but this is rarely obvious to the reader of this book, even to a careful reader.   In view of the subject matter and Holzman’s theme (that Angleton’s training in so-called practical criticism was invaluable to his career in counter-intelligence), one has to wonder if such sloppiness is deliberate.
Holzman also does not tell us much about the actual theory and practice of counter-intelligence, despite the title and the claims he makes up front.   In particular, his treatment of the Nosenko case is misleading, partly he believes the official CIA line and because he does not refer to the most recent publication on the case, namely the book by Bagley. Hawkes seems to have followed Holzman in his garden-path-up-straying.
Unlike literary criticism, espionage is not only about what to believe, it is also about what to do. It may be the case that Yuri Nosenko was a genuine Soviet defector, as Holzman claims CIA eventually came to believe. Others closely involved in the case, such as retired CIA agent Tennent Bagley (2007) have argued compellingly that Nosenko was in fact a KGB plant, not a genuine defector.
Whether or not Nosenko was a genuine defector, and whether or not CIA leadership believed him to be a genuine defector, CIA would also need to concern itself with what impact a revelation of their beliefs would have on KGB, as I have argued before, and thus on what proposition to seek to have KGB believe about CIA’s beliefs in the matter.   If CIA were seen by KGB to accept Nosenko’s testimony (inconsistent and incomplete, by his own admission) too quickly, KGB may not accept as genuine any CIA profession of belief in his bona fides. So, some delay and equivocation in decision-making was called for. If CIA professed to believe that Nosenko was a plant or allowed KGB to conclude that CIA believed Nosenko to be a plant, then CIA risked signalling to KGB that they (CIA) were also rejecting all the testimony he arrived in the west with, which included detailed protestations of KGB non-involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.    Whether or not CIA believed that KGB were involved in that assassination, they may or may not have wished to let KGB know what they believed, at least at that particular moment. In any case, perhaps a clever (and cunning) CIA would seek to have KGB believe that Nosenko was believed, in order to see how the game played itself out.
So, one possible course of action for CIA was to signal to KGB that they accepted Nosenko as a genuine defector, but to signal also that they came to this decision only slowly and painfully.   How better to do this than to interrogate the man at length and (allegedly) harshly, and then, after years of apparent indecision and multiple internal investigations (some of which may even have been genuine), decide to accept him publicly as a true defector.   This public acceptance – consultancy fees, letters, flags, medals, and all – even now, four decades later, may have absolutely no connection whatever with what CIA leadership really believed then or, indeed, what they believe now.
It’s not only litcrit that gets an outing in these events. If any philosopher reading this wonders about the practical usefulness of dynamic epistemic modal logic, wonder no more.
References:
Tennent H. Bagley [2007]: Spy Wars. New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press.
Terence Hawkes [2009]: “William Empson’s Influence on the CIA.” Times Literary Supplement, 2009-06-10.
Michael Holzman [2008]: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence. Boston, MA, USA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Scenarios and possible worlds

Published by peter on 2009-07-01 in Decision theory, History, Mathematics and Matherati. 0 Comments

Herman Kahn was the inventor of scenario analysis, and he first applied it to analysis of US military options in the Cold War with the USSR in the 1950s. I was struck when I read his books by the fact that scenarios were developed in the same decade as possible worlds semantics for logical systems or languages, and both at a time when most people felt there was a choice of only two or three over-arching political systems. (In contrast, from the fall of the Berlin Wall until the Global Financial Crisis, most people probably thought there was no such choice, western capitalism having prevailed over all alternative systems. Now, of course, nobody knows anything.)
Herman Kahn
I don’t think these simultaneous facts of scenarios and possible worlds were coincidences. Which leads me to a question that has long intrigued me: just who did develop possible worlds semantics? Although the idea dates at least to Leibniz, Saul Kripke is usually credited, and so these semantics are often called Kripke frames.

But there are other candidates:

Richard Montague, logician and linguist, who published in 1960, but had presented his work at a conference at UCLA in 1955.
Carew Meredith and Arthur Prior in 1956. According to Jack Copeland, these two logicians developed the first possible worlds semantics for propositional modal logic in a one-page note dated 1956. Meredith was a near contemporary of Frank Ramsey at Winchester and Trinity College, Cambridge.
Charles L. Hamblin, whose London University PhD thesis submitted in October 1956 presents a possible worlds semantics for question-response interactions.
Hugh Everett, who presented the first formal possible-worlds theory of quantum mechanics in physics, in his 1956 Princeton University PhD thesis.
Jaako Hintikka, who developed a possible worlds semantics for logics of belief. Although published in 1962, I understand Hintikka’s work was completed as early as 1957.
Stig Kanger, who published in 1957.
A. Bayart, a Belgian logician, who published in 1958 and 1959.

As I said, it is exceedingly odd that all these works were published around the same time. In addition, both Everett and Kahn were at Princeton University in the 1950s, although I don’t know if they overlapped. Also, Kahn had studied physics, so may have been aware of recent developments in the subject.

References:

A. Bayart [1958]: Correction de la logique modale du permier et du second ordre S5. Logique et Analyse, 1 (1): 28-45.

A. Bayart [1959]: Quasi-adéquation de la logique modale du second ordre S5 et adéquation de la logique modale du premier ordre S5. Logique et Analyse, 2 (6-7): 99-121.

B. J. Copeland [1999]: Notes towards a history of possible worlds semantics. pp. 1-14 in: The GoldBlatt Variations: Eight Papers in honour of Rob. Uppsala Prints and Preprints in Philosophy, Number 1. Uppsala, Sweden: Department of Philosophy, Uppsala University.

H. Everett [1956]: The Theory of the Universal Wave Function. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press. Reprinted as pp. 3-140 of: B. S. DeWitt and R. N. Graham [1973]: The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press. The main results of Everett’s PhD were published in: H. Everett [1957]: “Relative State” formulation of Quantum Mechanics. Review of Modern Physics, 29 (3): 454-462.

Robert Goldblatt [2006]: Mathematical modal logic: a view of its evolution. D. M. Gabbay and J. Woods (Editors): Handbook of the History of Logic. Volume 7.

C. L. Hamblin [1957]: Language and the Theory of Information. London, UK: PhD Thesis, Logic and Scientific Method Programme, University of London. Submitted October 1956, awarded 1957.

J. Hintikka [1962]: Knowledge and Belief. Ithaca, NY, USA: Cornell University Press.

H. Kahn [1960]: On Thermonuclear War. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.

H. Kahn [1965]: On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios. Pall Mall Press.

S. Kanger [1957]: Provability in Logic. Stockholm Studies in Philosophy. Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist and Wiksell.

S. Kripke [1959]: A completeness proof in modal logic. Journal of Symbolic Logic, 24: 1-14.

S. Kripke [1963]: Semantical analysis of modal logic I: normal propositional calculus. Zeitschrift fur mathematische Logic und Grundlagen der Mathematik, 9: 67-96.

The mathematics of jellyfish leaves much to be desired

Published by peter on 2009-06-24 in Decision theory and Mathematics. 0 Comments

A reader of Normblog presents a (standard) constructive argument for the counting numbers and then the infinite cardinals:

I happen to be friends with a jellyfish, called Jelly von Neumann. I asked Jelly about what Professor Atiyah said and she replied as follows…
‘Even if one has never seen any fish, crabs or the like, one may proceed as follows. First consider the empty set, { }, the set which has no elements whatsoever. Call that 0. Next, having got 0, consider the set {0}, whose only element is 0. Call that 1. Next consider the set {0, 1}, whose elements are exactly 0 and 1. Call that 2. Next consider the set {0, 1, 2}. Call that 3.
‘And so on. This gives you the infinite sequence 0, 1, 2, 3,… (One can prove that this sequence is infinite, since the operation involved is injective and never maps anything to 0.) You may even consider the whole infinite set, {0, 1, 2, 3,…}. Call this set omega. And you can go further. For consider the set {omega}. Call this omega + 1. Then consider {omega, omega + 1}, and call this omega + 2. Keep going. You get to omega + omega, and then omega + omega + omega. And so on. Eventually omega squared. Then omega cubed. And so on. Then omega to the power omega. And then (omega to the power omega) to the power omega. And then keep going. Eventually, you get to epsilon-zero. It gets a bit complicated after that. The point is that you can do mathematics just by virtue of thinking. Of course, I am a rather special jellyfish in that regard.’

Let us look carefully at the first few lines. Before we have defined or constructed a single number, we are expected to have available a notion of a set and a notion of an element of a set.

First consider the empty set, { }, the set which has no elements whatsoever.

This is very odd – we are people who apparently know some set theory, but we cannot yet count (since we have not yet constructed the counting numbers). And not just any set, but a set with no elements. So maybe we can count! How else can we tell that there are no elements in the empty set? Perhaps we can only count zero objects. And, moreover, this set is called “the empty set”, so presumably we know that there is only one of them. There’s some pretty advanced set theory right there, in that casual statement of uniqueness, I would say. (The claim of uniqueness, however, is not required for Jelly’s construction.)
Putting aside the question whether it is possible in principle for anyone, even those us with access to counting numbers, to count zero objects (arguably, counting is by definition an activity which requires the presence of at least one object to occur), let us continue with Jelly’s argument:

Call that 0.

So we can label objects.

Next, having got 0,

Wait a goddam minute, buster! We just labeled an object “{ }” with the label “0“. That is something different from getting or having anything. And surely, in order to label an object “{ }” with a label “0“, we must in some fundamental sense already had had the label “0“. If we did not already have it, how else could we use it to label an object? Jelly is using some pretty sleazy slight-of-hand here to slip from assigning a label that looks like a counting number to having the counting number itself, ready and able to be used for counting. If the label we had used was (say) the greek letter alpha, then Jelly’s argument would proceed in exactly the same way as before, but we would not end the argument having defined the counting numbers.
Ignoring these problems, let us proceed:

consider the set {0}, whose only element is 0.

So now “0″ is an object, available for use as the element of a set. And we not only know some set theory, we ALSO know how to construct sets! Just how do we do this? Do we pick the object (or the label?) called “0″ and put it inside some curly braces? How do we know when to start and stop picking objects? For some reason we picked just one object. Do we know how to count already? At the next step we construct a set with two objects:

Next consider the set {0, 1}, whose elements are exactly 0 and 1. Call that 2.

From what collection of objects (or labels?) did we select the one called “0″ , or (respectively) the ones called “0″ and “1″? We seem not only able to construct sets and to count objects, but we also know how to select particular objects (not just any old objects, but particular ones) from some undefined collection of objects. Quite some skills we have here, we people who don’t yet know how to count. And is the object that is here called “0” a different object with the same label as the one called “0” just three sentences before? If they are different, how many of these different objects with the same label do we have? And how can we tell them apart? And, if they are not different, we must be re-using the same object called “0”. Can we do this? When last handled by us (two sentences before), the object called “0” was sitting inside the set {0}. Can we just up and take it out and plonk it down inside the set {0,1}? There are lots of deep questions here, questions whose possibly-different answers motivate entire branches of pure mathematics (e.g., linear logic, which deals with formal logics where we have available only a fixed and finite number of each mathematical symbol), which our jellyfish-cum-mathematician is glossing over or ignoring.
After a few rounds of this, Jelly hits us with:

And so on. This gives you the infinite sequence 0, 1, 2, 3,…

Well, no, actually. We never get an infinite sequence, since we, in this universe, can only ever complete a finite number of such steps in our lifetimes. This is true even if all humans who ever lived, who are living, and who ever will live were to add their tuppence-worth of steps to the argument. It’s hard to have confidence in a jellyfish claiming to construct a collection of infinite cardinals who can’t seem to distinguish between a finite and an infinite sequence. At best (modulo the flaws identified above) we could get a finite, ever-growing sequence of counting numbers, a sequence that can be proven to exceed any pre-determined numerical threshold (thinking of these labels as real numbers for the moment), provided we allow sufficient time for the steps to be undertaken in the order described. A finite, ever-growing sequence is not ever an infinite sequence; at best, we might call it potentially-infinite.
I think Mr Jelly ought to forget the peano lessons and adopt a cat. And Norm, a Zimbabwean by birth, could perhaps remember how difficult it is to count objects in chiShona, with its ostentatious plenitude of noun-classes (21 according to Dale), and associated multitudes of counting words; urban Shona children nowadays usually count in English, even when they know little other English.
Reference:
D. Dale [1968]: Shona Companion. Mambo Press, Gweru, Zimbabwe. Second edition, 1972.

Here we go again! Secret decisions about Iraq

Published by peter on 2009-06-18 in Argumentation, Decision theory, History, Intelligence and Espionage, Politics and Terrorism. 0 Comments

The British Government has this week announced a secret inquiry into the invasion of Iraq in 2003. [UPDATE: The Government subsequently announced that the enquiry would not be held in secret.] How appropriate that a decision made in secret, with only scarce, belated and begrudging justification presented to the citizenry, should now be re-evaluated in secret. Even though today Gordon Brown says that the decision about secrecy is not his preference, he has delegated the decision about openness to the Chairman of the Inquiry. For this cowardice, Gordon Brown deserves the widespread contempt in which he is held.
On 14 February 2003, annoyed that the major public policy decision to invade Iraq had apparently already been made, and made in secret without due public consultation, I asked myself if such secrecy could ever be justified. The text below is what I wrote then. The existential wackawacka hunakuna about weapons of mass destruction since the invasion alters my arguments below not a jot.
In order to avoid re-appearance of comments I received in 2003, let me repeat that I make below no case about the worth of the invasion itself, neither for nor against the invasion. My case, is as the title says, a case for a justification for a claim, to be presented in public and subject to contestation and debate. If we’d had such a debate BEFORE the decision to invade had been made (ie, before July 2002) we would have either ended up with no invasion of Iraq at all, or one which many more citizens could have supported.

The Case for the Case for War

14 February 2003

The strange public debate we in the West have been having these last few months about whether and how to undertake military action against Iraq has led me to reflect on the role of argument in public life, especially as it concerns the making of major public policy decisions. While I have strong views on the substantive issues involved here, I am trying not to let them be apparent in my discussion this month of the decision-making processes involved. In particular, in this column, I am not putting the case for military action against Iraq at this time, and nor am I putting the case against such action. This column has no view on the matter. My argument is about the use of argument in decision-making in this domain.
1. The debate has been strange because of the refusal, until recently, of the main proponents of military action against Iraq (which action I’ll call simply “war”) to defend their claim publicly. Only last week, 6 months or so after public debate on this issue began, did the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, meet and debate the issue with ordinary people. Only last week, did the US Government present its intelligence evidence publicly to the UN. Only the week before did the UK Government release a document outlining its case (a document, it turned out, that was mostly plagiarised from public sources). As far as I’m aware, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, has still not provided reasons publicly for his Government’s policy of uncritical support for the US position, a refusal which led to him being censured by a majority vote of No Confidence in the Australian Senate, the first such in its history. In Britain, the authorities which operate the House of Commons have recently refused to permit a debate in the House on the question.
2. Why is this? Why have the main protagonists been unable and/or unwilling to defend their position, on an issue of such manifest importance? After all, every bar and every cafe the length of Britain (and elsewhere, if TV news reports here are any guide) is filled with ordinary people discussing the proposed war, so it is not as if people are uninterested in the question.
3. So, I asked myself: What would be good reasons for a Government not to give public justification for its desired action of war against Iraq? I thought of the following possible reasons for not giving reasons (in each case, as perceived by the proponents):

3.1 Revealing the case for war would endanger national security.
3.2 Revealing the case for war would place at peril the lives of, or in other ways compromise, intelligence sources.
3.3 The case for war is weak. For example, this would be the situation if the evidence for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction is only circumstantial.
3.4 The case for war dishonours the proponents. This would be the situation, for example, if the reasons for war were: “To capture Iraq’s oil”, or “To avenge the attempted assassination of George Bush senior.”
3.5 There is no need to put a case for war. In Britain, for example, it seems, as the Defence Secretary reminded us all last week, that the Government can engage in foreign wars simply by convincing the Queen to sign the relevant order; there are no legal or constitutional requirements to convince the House of Commons, or Parliament, or the public at large. I imagine the US War Powers Act, which requires the support of Congress before the President can declare war, may limit the US administration’s freedom somewhat more.
3.6 The case for war is so complex that the public would not understand it.
3.7 The proponents do not respect the other parties in the debate (those opposed to the war, and those still undecided), and so are not bothered to put the case to those others. Many Australians appear to believe that this is the attitude of the Australian Prime Minister on this issue.

To me, speaking personally, reasons 3.1 and 3.2 would be a compelling justification for not revealing the case for war, but I don’t recall any of the proponents giving these as their reasons. None of the other reasons would be compelling to me as reasons for not engaging in public argument on this issue.
4. So, I then asked myself: How would I persuade the proponents of war to give us, the citizenry, their reasons for their proposed actions. Again, I thought of several reasons for giving reasons for war:

4.1 Failure to put any case at all leads people to suspect that the real case is weak or dishonourable. One might call this the Baskerville Argument for giving reasons: If the dogs don’t bark, then why are they silent?
4.2 Engagement in argument enables each side to strengthen their case: to learn of the possible attacks against it, to identify defences and counter-attacks for these, and so to bolster the arguments. The outcome of any comprehensive public debate should be a stronger case for war.
4.3 For complex public policy decisions, such as this one, there are usually many alternative action-options, and many and diverse implications and consequences of those options. In fact, the complexity may be such that no one person, or even no single team of people, could adequately hope to assess and comprehend all these. (This is especially the case for teams of politicians and bureaucrats, out of touch with ordinary reality, as the group think of the CIA in the Bay Of Pigs incident showed.) Only by allowing a full public debate before a decision is made can society be certain that all the relevant issues have been raised and have informed the decision, and thus that the best action-option has been chosen.
4.4 Military action is an example of a public policy decision where ultimate success or failure may depend greatly on the quality of execution, as much as on the particular action-option selected. This in turn may depend on the morale of the military personnel undertaking the action, which in turn may depend on the extent of public support those military personnel have. Without public support for a particular military action, it is much less likely to be successful, at least in a democracy. (I believe this argument is part of the so-called Powell Doctrine, formulated by the US Secretary of State when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of the Defense Forces Staff under US Presidents Bush snr. and Clinton.)
But public support depends crucially on public acceptance of the final decision made, and this in turn depends on the public believing that they have played a part in the decision process. Public debate is necessary, therefore, to establish and sustain public involvement in the decision-making process. People may support a decision outcome even when they disagree with it, if they believe they played an appropriate part in the decision-making process. (I believe this is is real lesson of the experience of the US and Australia in Vietnam: not that the decision to wage war in Vietnam was inherently wrong — it may or may not have been wrong — but rather that the public did not feel they had been sufficiently consulted before it was made, or sufficiently consulted as the military involvement increased. Thus, they did not support it.) Prior and ongoing public debate, rather than being a hindrance to execution quality, may therefore increase execution quality, and may in fact be essential to the ultimate success of the military action itself.
4.5 In a democracy, failure to justify and persuade the citizenry of the wisdom of some major policy is ultimately a mistaken strategy, electorally.
4.6 On important public policy issues in a democracy, consensus is unlikely if not impossible. It is therefore crucial to channel disagreement into public argument and debate, in order to prevent recourse to other forms of expression of opinion, such as mass protests and acts of violence. Public argument thus acts as a “safety valve”.
4.7 In a democracy, politicians have a duty to explain their proposed actions to the citizenry who pay their salaries.

5. Reasons 4.1 – 4.6 are instrumental: they are attempts to show that providing public reasons for war will behoove the proponents of war, and/or improve the quality of decision-making and decision-execution. Reason 4.7 is a moral claim.
6. Some of the arguments listed in Section 4 are not new. For example, argument 4.3 about deliberative processes improving the quality of decision outcomes was made by D. J. Fiorini in 1989, and, in a different form, by Bill Rehg in 2001:

D. J. Fiorino [1989]: “Environmental risk and democratic process: a critical review.” Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, 14: 501-547.
W. Rehg [2001]: “The argumentation theorist in deliberative democracy.” Keynote address to the Conference of the International Debate Education Association (IDEA), Prague, October 2001. Revised version published in Controversia, 1(1): 18-42 (2002).

Similarly, James McBurney and Glen Mills, briefly argued a case similar to my argument 4.6, in:

James H. McBurney and Glen Mills [1964]: Argumentation and Debate: Techniques of a Free Society. New York, USA: Macmillan, Second edition.

Moreover, my argument 4.4 may be a valid inference from the Powell doctrine, as I suggest above.
7. However, these works are all primarily concerned with other issues, and do not aim to present an argument for public argument over matters of importance. Does anyone know of papers or books which do put such a case?

Postscript 1 (added 17 February 2003): The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has just presented a detailed case for taking military action against Iraq, in a speech to the British Labour Party in Glasgow two days ago. I believe this was his first extended public presentation of his arguments for military action; the speech was given on the same day that a million people marched in central London against any war in Iraq. The British House of Commons has still not been permitted to debate the matter.
Postscript 2 (added 17 February 2003): British political commentator, Andrew Rawnsley, wrote in his weekly column in The Observer yesterday:

“There are powerful arguments and there are dreadful arguments in favour of definitively dealing with the Iraqi tyrant, and it has been one of the failures of the British and American governments not to advance the better ones.” (Andrew Rawnsley: “It’s do or die, Prime Minister”, The Observer, 16 February 2003.)

Postscript 3 (added 17 February 2003): From an editorial today in The Guardian, a British daily newspaper:

“In fact, the public is wary of the power of argument because it is attenuated, circumscribed and distorted by political calculations. This may explain why many suspected the government of trying to scare people into war when tanks were placed near airports. The temper of these times is to distrust more than trust.” (“The march of history: A moment of truth for British politics”, The Guardian, 17 February 2003.)

Postscript 4 (added 26 February 2003): Finally, the British House of Commons is permitted to debate this issue. Here is Tony Blair’s statement to the House yesterday.
Postscript 5 (added 12 April 2003): Playwright David Hare is unable still – after three weeks of fighting and the capture of Baghdad – to determine the reasons for the war.
Postscript 6 (added 8 May 2003): At last, an argument I can understand decision-makers in the US and British Governments may have found was compelling: that, although the probability that the Iraqi regime had links with Islamic fundamentalist terrorists may not be large, the consequences of such links may be catastrophic. See the article by Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Unknown: The C.I.A. and the Pentagon take another look at Al Qaeda and Iraq” in The New Yorker magazine, published 10 February 2003. Why did the decision-makers not trust us citizens enough to share such analyses?
Postscript 7 (added 21 June 2003): Author and publisher Jason Epstein, writing in The New York Review of Books, May 1, 2003, in an article entitled “Leviathan” (pp. 13-14), said this about the Second Iraq War:

Meanwhile, Americans are sharply divided over a preemptive assualt whose urgency has not been adequately explained and for which no satisfactory explanation, beyond the zealotry of its sponsors, may exist. (page 13)

Postscript 8 (added 14 September 2003): The Observer’s superb political journalist, Andrew Rawnsley, argues in his column today that Tony Blair “didn’t trust the British people to follow the moral argument for dealing with Saddam. This mistrust in them they now reciprocate back to him. For that, Tony Blair has only himself to blame.”
Postscript 9 (added 28 November 2003): Thomas Powers, in an article entitled “The Vanishing Case for War”, in The New York Review of Books, 50(19): 12-17, 4 December 2003, says this (p. 12):

“The invasion and conquest of Iraq by the United States last spring was the result of what is probably the least ambiguous case of the misreading of secret intelligence information in American history. Whether it is even possible that a misreading so profound could yet be in some sense “a mistake” is a question to which I shall return. Going to war was not something we were forced to do and it certainly was not something we were asked to do. It was something we elected to do for reasons that have still not been fully explained.The official argument for war, pressed in numerous speeches by President Bush and others, failed to convince most of the world that war against Iraq was necessary and just; it failed to soften the opposition to war by longtime allies like France and Germany; and it failed to persuade even a simple majority of the Security Council to vote for war despite immense pressure from Washington. The President’s argument was accepted only by the United States Congress, which voted to give him blanket authority to attack Iraq, and then kept silent during the worldwide debate that followed. The entire process – from the moment it became unmistakably clear that the President had decided to go to war in August 2002, until his announcement on May 1 that “major combat” was over – took about nine months, and it will stand for decades to come as an object lesson in secrecy and its hazards.”

Postscript 10 (added 5 April 2004): Richard A. Clarke in his book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), lists (page 265) five rationales which have been attributed to senior Bush II Administration officials (GW Bush, D Cheney, D Rumsfeld and P Wolfowitz) for seeking a war against Iraq. I paraphrase these here:

To finish the Gulf War of 1991
To remove a hostile enemy of Israel
To create an Arab democracy as a model for other regional states, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia
To remove a potentially hostile enemy of Saudi Arabia (and hence enable the withdrawal of US troops stationed there)
To create another friendly source of oil for the US, and so reduce dependency on Saudi oil.

Postscript 11 (added 15 August 2005): George Packer, in an article entitled “The Home Front: A soldier’s father wrestles with the ambiguities of Iraq” (The New Yorker, 4 July 2005, pp. 48-59) says this:

“In the fall of 2002, it still might have been possible for President Bush to construct an Iraq policy that united both parties and America’s democratic allies in defeating tyranny in Iraq. Such a policy, however, would have required the Administration to operate with flexibility and openness. The evidence on unconventional weapons would have had to be laid out without exaggeration or deception. The work of U.N. inspectors in Iraq would have had to be supported rather than undermined. Testimony to Congress would have had to be candid, not slippery. Administration officials who offered dissenting views or pessimistic forecasts would have had to be heard rather than silenced or fired. American citizens would have had to be treated as grownups, and not, as Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, once suggested, as ten-year-olds.” (page 54).

Anti-Krugman on free trade

Published by peter on 2009-05-27 in Decision theory, Economics, Globalization, Manufacturing and Politics. 0 Comments

Without intending to, I again came across an essay by Paul Krugman that I had first read 3 years ago, in which he seeks to understand why anyone could be opposed to the claims of mainstream economics in favour of free trade, particuarly anyone intelligent and informed. Unfortunately, Krugman fails at his self-appointed task, because he resorts to arguments which are essentially ad hominem attacks on the opponents of free trade theories.

In the context of the assessment of alternative public policies I view ad hominem arguments as invalid and irrational, a sign that a proponent cannot provide substantive justifications for his or her claims. (Such personalist attacks are not necessarily invalid or irrational in all contexts.) I believe economists do themselves and their profession a great disservice by dismissing arguments against free trade on the grounds of ignorance or insufficient intelligence, or any of the other ad hominem arguments Krugman uses.

There is a perfectly respectable intellectual argument, not based on ignorance, against Ricardo’s argument. This is that his theory ignores the single most important question in the debate, which is: Where does a comparative advantage come from? A national comparative advantage is almost never, despite what many free trade advocates seem to think, an act of God. It is almost always the result of human actions, witting or unwitting. The Republic of Korea (South Korea) has no “natural” reason to be a world-leading steel-producer or world-class large-ship-maker. But successive ROK Governments intended the nation to lead these industries, and the nation has in consequence succeeded in doing so: through direct government investment; through subsidies to Korean companies; through discriminatary trade practices against foreign companies; and through large-scale, concerted, long-term public and private pressure on private Korean companies to invest in particular ways, and not in other ways.

I note in passing that a strong national desire to establish an international lead in a particular commercial sector does not necessarily mean it will happen. Japan’s powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), when it existed, tried repeatedly to establish Japan as a global leader in avionics, electronics used in aircraft, without any success at all.

So, imagine you are a political leader of a country with an existing large-ship-building industry faced with rising Korean competition, for example the UK in 1980. Your chief economic advisor tells you that free trade is an unmitigated good, and that your markets should all be open, because the economic benefits outweigh the costs. These economic benefits may outweigh the associated costs or they may not in any particular case, and they may well fall differentially upon different stakeholders with different political power. Even if the economic benefits outweigh the economic costs, the social cost-benefit analysis may be very different (eg, long-term unemployment; increased crime as a result of unemployment; the destruction of local communities; the dispersal or loss of a skills base; the loss of defence-related industries and companies; etc).

Whatever the cost-benefit outcomes, what really sticks in my craw is that the advice from economists is to do nothing to protect local industrial capabilities, so that others who have ignored such advice (eg, the Government of the ROK) should prosper. You would think that, of all people, economists would have learnt some game theory!
The argument here is not between the ignorant and the wise, as Krugman seems to think, but between people with conflicting sets of values. My values tell me that economic theory should include discussions of political power, discussions of social, cultural and institutional structures, and discussions of the reasons for and the consequences of differing preferences over outcomes; most mainstream economists do not think these issues are part of economic theory.

To be called ignorant because I have different set of values to an economist is not only an insult, and not only disrespectful of my rights as a stakeholder in the society in which I live; it is also revealing of the vapidity of mainstream economics, busy building abstract theories which ignore all the most important questions.
Economists have heard these criticisms of free trade theory since at least the time of Marx. Is it recalcitrance or malfeasance that allows mainstream economists to write articles as if ignorant of such criticisms?

Commuting in the age of email

Published by peter on 2009-05-26 in Argumentation, Corporate culture, Decision theory, Joint-Action Society, Planning, Post-Industrial Nomads, Project Management and Team working. 0 Comments

If you believe, as the prevailing social metaphor would have it, that this is the Age of Information, then you could easily imagine that the main purpose of human interactions is to request and provide information. That seems to be the implicit assumption underlying Lane Wallace’s discussion of commuting and working-from-home here.   Wallace is surprised that anyone still travels to work, when information can be transferred so much more readily by phone, email and the web.
But the primary purpose of most workplace interactions is not information transfer, or this is so only incidentally. Rather, workplace interactions are about the co-ordination of actions — identifying and assessing alternatives for future action, planning and co-ordinating future actions, and reporting on past actions undertaken or current actions being executed.    To engage in such interactions about action of course involves requests for and transfers of information.    To the extent that this is the case, such interactions can be and indeed are undertaken with participants separated in space and time.   But co-ordination of actions requires very different speech acts to those (relatively simple) locutions seeking and providing information: speech acts such as proposals, promises, requests, entreaties, and commands. These speech acts have two distinct and characteristic features — they usually require uptake (the intended hearer or actor must agree to the action before the action is undertaken), and the person with the power of retraction or revocation is not necessarily the initial speaker.   An accepted promise can only be revoked by the person to whom the promise is made, for instance, not by the person who made the promise. So, by their very nature these locutions are dialogical acts, not monolectical.   You can’t meaningfully give commands to yourself, for example, and what value is a promise made in a forest? Neither of these two features apply to speech acts involving requests for information or responses to requests for information.
In addition, inherent in speech acts over actions is the notion of intentionality.    If I promise to you to do action X, then I am expressing an intention to do X. If your goals requires that action X be commenced or done, then you need to assess how sincere and how feasible my promise is. Part of your assessment may be based on your past experience with me, and/or the word of others you trust about me (my reputation).   Thus it is perfectly possible for you to assess my capability and my sincerity without ever meeting me. International transactions across all sorts of industries have taken place for centuries between parties who never met; the need to assess sincerity and capability is surely a key reason for the dominance of families (eg, the Rothschilds in the 18th and 19th centuries) and close-knit ethnic groups (eg, the Chinese diaspora) in international trade networks. But, if you don’t know me already, it is generally much easier and more reliable for you to assess my sincerity and capability by looking me in the eye as I make my promise to you.
Bloggers and writers and professors, who rarely need to co-ordinate actions with anyone to achieve their work goals, seem not to understand these issues very well. But these are issues are known to anyone who actually does anything in the world, whether in politics, in public administration or in business.   One defining feature of modern North American corporate culture, in my experience, is that most people find it preferable to make promises of actions even when they do not yet have, and when they know that they do not yet have, the capabilities or resources required to undertake the actions promised. They do this rather than not make the promise or rather than making the promise conditional on obtaining the necessary resources, in order to appear “positive” to their bosses.   This is the famous “Can Do” attitude at work, and I have discussed it tangentially before in connection with the failure of the Bay of Pigs;  its contribution to the failures of modern American business needs a separate post.

Black swans of trespass

Published by peter on 2009-04-08 in Decision theory, Economics, Forecasting and Uncertainty. 0 Comments

gould-blackswan
Nassim Taleb has an article in the FinTimes presenting ten principles he believes would reduce the occurrence of rare, catastrophic events (events he has taken to calling black swans). Many of his principles are not actionable, and several are ill-advised. Take, for instance, # 3:

3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus.

If this principle was applied, the bus would have no drivers at all. All of us are driving blindfolded, with our only guide to the road ahead being what we can apprehend from the rear-view mirror. Past performance, as they say, is no guide to the future direction of the road.
Or take #6:

6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning. Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it. Citizens must be protected from themselves, from bankers selling them “hedging” products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists.

Well, what precisely is “complex”? Surely, Dr Taleb is not suggesting the banning of plain futures and options, as these serve a valuable function in our economy (enabling the parceling and trading of risk). But even these are too complex for some people (such as those farmers, dentists, and local government officials currently with burnt fingers), and surely such people need protection from themselves much more so than the quant-jocks and their masters on Wall Street. So, where would one draw the line between allowed derivative and disallowed?
Once again, it appears there has been a mis-understanding of the cause of the recent problems. It is not complex derivatives per se that are the problem, but the fact that many of these financial instruments have, unusually, been highly-correlated. Thus, the failure of one instrument (and subsequently, one bank) brings down all the others with it — there is a systemic risk as well as a participant risk involved in their use. Dr Taleb, who has long been a critic of the unthinking use of Gaussian models in finance, I am sure realises this.

At the hot gates: a salute to Nate Fick

Published by peter on 2009-04-05 in Argumentation, Decision theory, Film, Heroes, History, Joint-Action Society, Planning and Team working. 0 Comments

After viewing The Wire, certainly the best television series I have ever seen (and perhaps the best ever made), I naturally sought out Generation Kill, from the same writing team – David Simons and Ed Burns. Also gripping and intelligent viewing, although (unlike The Wire), we only see one side’s view of the conflict.   The series follows a US Marine platoon, Second Platoon of Bravo Company of the 1st  Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, as they invade Iraq in March-April 2003.   Like Band of Brothers, we come to know the platoon and its members very well, feeling joy at their wins, and sorrow at their losses. The TV series is based on an eponymous 2004 book by a journalist, Evan Wright, who was embedded with the platoon in this campaign.
The TV series led me, however,  to read another book about this platoon, written by its commanding officer Lt. Nathaniel Fick (played in the series by actor Stark Sands).    The book is superb! Fick writes extremely well, intelligently and evocatively, of his training and his battle experiences. His prose style is direct and uncluttered, without being a parody of itself (as is, say, Hemingway’s). His writing is remarkably smooth, gliding along, and this aspect reminded me of Doris Lessing, on one of her good days.   Fick clearly has a firm moral centre (perhaps an outcome of his Jesuit high school education), evident from his initial decision to apply to the military while still an undergraduate classics major at Dartmouth.     Having felt a similarly-strong desire as an undergraduate to experience life at the hot gates, I empathized immensely with his description of himself at that time.   Fick’s moral grounding is shown throughout the book, not only in the decisions he takes in battle, and his reflections on these decisions, but also in the way he refrains from naming those of his commanding officers whom he does not respect.    He also shows enormous loyalty to the men he commanded.
And Fick’s experiences demonstrate again that no organization, not even military forces, can succeed for very long when commands are only obeyed mindlessly.   Successfully execution of commands requires intelligent dialogue between commanders and recipients, in a process of argumentation, to ensure that uttered commands are actionable, appropriate, feasible, effective, consistent, ethical and advisable. Consequently, the most interesting features of the book for me were the descriptions of decision-making, descriptions often implicit.   Officers and non-officers, it seems, are drilled, through hours of rote learning, in the checklists and guiding principles necessary for low-level, tactical decision-making, so that these decisions can be automatic. Only after these mindless drills are second nature are trainee officers led to reflect on the wider (strategic and ethical) aspects of decisions, of decision-making and of actions.   I wonder to what extent such an approach would work in business, where most decision-making, even the most ordinary and tactical, is acquired through direct experience and not usually taught as drills. Mainly this is because we lack codification of low-level decision-making, although strong fmcg companies such as Mars or Unilever come closest to codification of tactical decision-making.
Fick’s frequent frustrations with the commands issued to him seem to arise because these commands often ignore basic tactical constraints (such as the area of impact of weapons or the direction of firing of weapons), and because they often seem to be driven by a concern for appearances over substantive outcomes.   In contrast to this frustration, one of Fick’s commanding heroes is Major Richard Whitmer, whose unorthodox managerial style and keen intelligence is well described. A military force able to accommodate such a style is to be admired, so I hope it is not a reflection on the USMC that Whitmer appears to have spent the years since the Iraq invasion running a marine recruitment office. Next time that I’m CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I’ll actively try to recruit Whitmer and Fick, since they are both clearly superb managers.
I was also struck by how little the troops on the ground in Iraq knew of the larger, strategic picture. Fick’s team relied on broadcasts from the BBC World Service on a personal, non-military-issue transister radio to learn what was happening as they invaded Iraq.   We who were not involved in the war also relied on the BBC, particularly Mark Urban’s fascinating daily strategic analyses on BBC TV’s Newsnight. Were we remote viewers better informed than those in the ground in Iraq? Quite possibly.
Nathaniel Fick now works for a defence think tank, the Center for a New American Security. A 2006 speech he gave at the Pritzer Military Library in Chicago can be seen here.   A seminar talk to Johns Hopkins University’s series on Rethinking the Future Nature of Competition and Conflict can be found here (scroll down to 2006-01-25). And here is Fick’s take on recent war poetry.
References:
K. Atkinson et al. [2008]: Command dialogues. In: I. Rahwan and P. Moraitis (Editors): Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems (ArgMAS 2008), AAMAS 2008, Lisbon, Portugal.
Nathaniel Fick [2005]: One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer. London, UK: Phoenix.
Evan Wright [2004]: Generation Kill. Putnam.

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