Lamar Soutter Newsletter

Hello All!

The year is drawing to a close, and while we all spend time with friends and family, the political landscape in the country continues, as it always has, to shift.

This was the first year for my newsletter (well, half a year, the newsletter started in June). I would like to sincerely thank all of you who have taken the time to read and reply to some or all of the publications, and to refer them to friends. I see it as a good sign that referrals to friends outstripped referrals to Belleview by just over 6 to 1.

As the year wraps up, the question is… how did we do?

The Recipe for Haggis / The Impeachment of a President:

Last week, Representative John Conyers took the first official step towards impeaching the president. He has introduced three house resolutions.

The first of these would create a select committee charged with determining if Bush and Cheney should be impeached. The committee would investigate whether they had intended to invade Iraq before given the authority (as per the Downing Street Memo), manipulated intelligence, and advocated the use of torture. If the committee recommends impeachment, the HJC will consider and vote on specific charges.

The second and third resolutions call for censure of the president and vice president for, among other things, failing to respond to John Conyers’ letter of May 6th regarding the Downing Street Memo.

God’s Tenure:

Also last week history was made in Pennsylvania.

A Dover area school board had voted to require Intelligent Design (ID) to be taught in science classes as an alternative to Evolution. The ACLU challenged the policy, and on December 23ed a republican judge, appointed by Bush, ruled that ID is not science, and teaching it in science classes violates the separation of church and state.

“We have concluded that it is not [science], and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents,” he wrote. “To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom.”

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It is my goal to offer a unique perspective on a wide range of topics, and challenge and educate readers. Given the feedback from articles such as Three Months at N2 and Día de la Resistencia Indigena, as well as the success of The Recipe for Haggis and God’s Tenure, I am hopeful that the newsletter has succeeded.

In the next year, expect to see discussions on how perception influences reality, Chaos Theory, the great psychologist Albert Einstein (who also, as you may know, did some obscure work in physics), freedom of speech, the Kennedy Assassination, Political Action Committees, and deterrence and the criminal mind, just to name a few.

I hope you all enjoyed the year, and hope your next year is even better. Thank you all for your support and feedback, and have a wonderful 2006.

Nicholas Lamar Soutter.

“I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down”
Bill Bennett (09/28/05)
“We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”
Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect (09/26/01)

A few years ago I met a psychic. Skeptical at first, I was amazed by the overwhelming proof of her ability to predict the future. She had even predicted the assassination of JFK and called the White House days before his trip to Texas, warning him not to go. If only they had listened to her….

She keeps with her a clipping from a newspaper, where her ominous warning to the president was published, as were her credentials as a psychic.

Unfortunately, as impressive as her abilities are, there are a few things she fails to mention to prospective clients. First of all, the White House receives 600 calls a year from “psychics” warning the president of his impending assassination. At nearly two calls a day, a far more surprising event would be if the president was assassinated and someone hadn’t predicted it.

Secondly, she failed to mention that that particular call was the fourth she had made predicting an assassination. The previous three had all been wrong (as were the next 12 she made for future presidents). Further, as impressive as predicting the assassination was, she has not made any other successful predictions in the last 40 years.

It is true, that she accurately predicted, and even attempted to warn of, the Kennedy assassination. But that fact, without a larger context, is extremely misleading.

When Bill Bennett said that one could lower the crime rate by aborting black babies, the media went wild. How could he advocate such a position?

The truth is he didn’t. He stated a fact.

It is far easier (and more self satisfying) to adopt a position of anger and moral outrage, than it is to look at his statement in context, and see if the apparently obvious implication of the statement is in fact what he intended to say. It is a case of Attribution Error, assuming that his motives must have been racist.

A listener had called into Mr. Bennett’s show and argued that the “lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30 years” would have been enough to save Social Security.

Mr. Bennett was immediately skeptical of that statistic, and argued he did not believe it to be accurate, that it painted an incomplete picture of the economic impact of abortion. The caller claimed the statistic to be completely accurate, to which Mr. Bennett replied that it was also true “that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

His point? That statistics can often only paint half the picture, that such “far-reaching, extensive extrapolations” (as he put it) were meaningless, and that to argue that abortion should be illegal as a means of saving Social Security was as ludicrous as to argue that abortion should be legal as a means of reducing crime, no matter what the statistics said. His called his own statements “ridiculous, and morally reprehensible”, which is of course why he made them.

For his comment about the 9/11 hijackers, Bill Maher was fired from ABC for being to insensitive (despite the fact that he had held an empty seat on his show for a month for conservative commentator Barbara Olson, who died when her plane hit the pentagon while she was on her way to be on his show). What was Bill Maher’s point? That it’s easy to be dismissive of the terrorists, to call them cowards and say that there is no reason that they hate us, but it isn’t the truth, and it greatly underestimates them.

I once announced to a college class that women generally have smaller brains than men, suffering a politically correct backlash that followed me for four years. Somehow I was sexist. Somehow people thought that I must mean that women aren’t as smart as men. The fact that my statement was scientifically accurate had no bearing on the fact that I was obviously sexist, that I obviously meant to say that women weren’t as smart as men. I was in fact attempting to discuss the differences between men and women, in how the hemispheres of the brain communicate through the corpus callosum.

Women do have smaller brains (if you find that offensive, talk to God, I had nothing to do with it). Why anyone thinks this implies a lower intelligence is beyond me. A five foot person has smaller organs (including the brain) than I do, but can easily be smarter. A blue whale has a significantly larger brain than I do, but it can’t calculate a 15% tip. Intelligence is measured, not by the size of the brain, but by the ratio of brain mass to body mass. This fact, which I had assumed would be obvious given the wide range of human body sizes, was not considered by the people who judged my statement, leading to the erroneous conclusion that I necessarily implied that which I hadn’t.

I have never heard of Bill Bennett. He may be a racist – I have made arguments neither for nor against that claim. His declaration was a stupid thing to say, and I can imagine a hundred better ways to prove the point he was trying to make. But this country has (likely out of boredom) concluded that he stated or implied that blacks are the cause of crime, or that they should be aborted, or that blacks are less important than whites. He implied none of those things. What he said was that statistics can, when extrapolated properly, be used to justify positions which are clearly incorrect. And he’s right.

Effective communication is the basis of civilization. It can not exist without an understanding of what one is trying to say. That understanding comes in part through the sharing of a common vocabulary, but language alone is often ineffective at conveying thoughts. As important as language is, of equal importance is learning how to listen. One can attempt to understand offensive speech without condoning it, but one can never truly object to offensive speech unless they know what was said.

Having just defended him, I do hope he’s not a racist.

Two of the most common cognitive mistakes, Confirmation Bias and Attribution Error, have far reaching consequences in everything from politics to auto repair.

Attribution Error is where, given an absence of contradictory information, people will assign positive motives to themselves (or people like them), and negative motives to others (or dissimilar people) for any given act.

The most common example is driving. When we cut someone off, we say we did it accidentally, because we were in a rush, or, in some cases, because they deserved it.

However, when someone cuts us off, we say they did it because they’re a jerk or a bad person. This is opposed to equally probable explanations such as they did it accidentally, because they were in a rush, or because, in some cases, we deserved it.

This is why there are no guilty people in prison. Convicts usually claim that while other prisoners may deserve to be punished, their own crimes (even murder) were justified.

Any “immoral” act (stealing, accepting bribes, lying under oath) by a political figure will be seen by his party in the most sympathetic light possible, as an aberration, mistake, or lapse of judgment. The opposing party will see the same offense as a sign of failed moral character, and a symptom of rampant corruption. That is until a member of that party commits the same act.

Confirmation Bias is the human tendency to only try to prove theory, not disprove it. This is differs from the tendency to try to avoid being proven wrong, as confirmation bias applies even in the genuine search for new knowledge, not just to the testing of established beliefs.

Imagine 4 cards, each with a number on one side, and a letter on the other side:

E 7 4 F

If someone (lets call her “Susan”) says that “Every card which has a vowel on one side has an even number on the other,” which cards would you have to flip over to see if Susan is right?

Think about it before moving on…

The way to determine if Susan is right is to see if every card with a vowel on one side has an even number on the other. If even one vowel has an odd number, then Susan is wrong.

“E” is the most common first card flipped, and indeed is correct. If the number on the other side of “E” is odd, then Susan is wrong. If it is even, that doesn’t mean Susan is right- just that she’s right so far.

“4” is the second most common card flipped. This is wrong, and is our first encounter with confirmation bias. What is on the other side of “4” is irrelevant. If it’s a consonant, that doesn’t make Susan wrong (She didn’t say ONLY vowels had an even number on the other side). If it’s a vowel, that’s consistent with Susan’s statement, but doesn’t prove it, or give us any information we don’t already have.

“F” is, by the same token, irrelevant.

The “7” card is not flipped by most people. This is another mistake. If the other side has a consonant, it means nothing. But if it’s a vowel, then Susan is decidedly wrong. This card must be flipped to determine if Susan is right, but people ignore it because of confirmation bias.

When al-Qa’ida successfully destroyed the world trade center, they saw it as evidence that God was on their side. When they failed to simultaneously blow up 6 airliners over the Atlantic, they didn’t consider it proof that He wasn’t. That is confirmation bias.

Rev. Jerry Falwell claimed that God allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur because of gays and abortion rights. Florida was later hit with the worst series of hurricanes in its history, with Miami-Dade getting disproportionately high damage. Despite this coming on the heels of serious irregularities in Florida’s 2000 election, mostly centered on Miami-Dade, he did not claim that God allowed it as a result of voter fraud. That is attribution error.

One political example where attribution error and confirmation bias combine and confound is in claims of political bias in the media.

Each side of the political spectrum believes that the media is biased against them. The Pew Charitable Trusts Project for Independence in Journalism found that in the 2004 election John Kerry got a higher volume favorable press than George Bush. Most right wing media organizations have cried loud and oft that this is proof of liberal bias in the media.

To assume that favorable press is an indication of bias is an attribution error. Favorable press could just as easily come from a candidate’s charm, his ability to cover up indiscretion, genuine moral superiority, or time in the public eye (4 years in office gave greater opportunity to dig up dirt on Bush), or any number of things. The right simply assumes it must be because the media is biased.

Assuming for a moment that favorability did indicate bias, there is yet another problem with using the 2004 Pew study to show liberal bias. That problem is the 2000 Pew study, which found that in the 2000 election the media gave Bush nearly 50% more favorable coverage than it gave Gore. Pew called the studies mirror images of each other.

The 2004 study references the 2000 study, and they are on the same website. Yet The Washington Times, Fox News, and other right wing news sources are continually claiming that the 2004 study proves a liberal bias. Given the 2000 study, the claim borders on ludicrous.

Are you liberal? Are you reading this right now? Enjoying it? The right wing sucks, don’t they? Knowingly lying about what the 2004 study means… Of course, to say that is to suffer attribution error, when it is far more likely that the right’s oversight is simply confirmation bias.