Torture and Black Sites

A recent article in the New Yorker details a good deal about both the methods and the problems of torturing subjects for information. It's a bit long, but worth reading. It isn't graphic or gratuitous, yet it can be hard to stomach. I usually keep things short, but I wanted to include two passages (among many) that I found chilling.

This first is about the immediate consequences to those administering "advanced interrogation techniques."

The former officer said that the C.I.A. kept a doctor standing by during interrogations. He insisted that the method was safe and effective, but said that it could cause lasting psychic damage to the interrogators. During interrogations, the former agency official said, officers worked in teams, watching each other behind two-way mirrors. Even with this group support, the friend said, Mohammed’s interrogator “has horrible nightmares.” He went on, “When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it’s well outside the norm. You can’t go to that dark a place without it changing you.” He said of his friend, “He’s a good guy. It really haunts him. You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”

The following quotation is about how psychologists--in this case James Mitchell--advised and provided theoretically underpinnings for the interrogation program.

Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that “learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.” Mitchell, he said, “draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners’ ability to forecast the future—when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn’t after intelligence.”

The Importance of Being Tyler Cowen Redux

I bought and started Tyler Cowen's Discover Your Inner Economist. My review in short: it's mediocre. My impression is that the book is short on teaching and reasoning and long on recommendations for behavior. In the parlance of writers it tells too much and shows too little. Part of this, I believe, is that Cowen himself wrote it. If he'd had a ghostwriter or a better editor, we might've gotten a book that shows us more.

My next complaint is that the book doesn't build a small set of surprises or insights. There's too much in the book for it to give one an aha. Again, a good editor would have understood that too much information is as bad as too little. The pace at which the book moves through different topics left me feeling that I hadn't really been satisfied on the previous point before being dragged to the next one.

As a final criticism, I found the book lacking in references. The endnotes were even thinner than I had feared. I know something about some of Cowen's many topics and needed some of the references to counterbalance my own views. More importantly, I really would have liked to follow some of the research that interested me.

To be fair, the book is worth more of your time than many books. But of course, most books are below average. Well, at or below the median anyway.

Iraq and the Sunk-cost Fallacy

The OpEd section of the USA Today has an editorial about the sunk-cost fallacy and the war in Iraq. First, while this editorial isn't the first place to point out our sunk-cost reasoning on this matter, I still think it's well done. Second, it does a good job of teaching us about the sunk-cost fallacy, which we all fall prey to on a regular basis.

Link to article

Epistemology Naturalized

Maybe I'm a bit slow, but reading this paper, I realized that economics has inherited Quine's program of naturalized epistemology.

Microeconomics and so-called neuroeconomics are both an attempt to understand human judgment (as opposed to choice) under uncertainty. Interestingly, I argued some time ago that Quine's suggestion was doomed to commit, essentially, the naturalistic fallacy.

In short, I'm becoming persuaded that I was mistaken.

The Importance of Being Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen is a member of the venerable economics department at George Mason. He's got a book entitled Discovering Your Inner Economist. It's due for release tomorrow (2 aug 2007). Here's a fascinating and glowing review from New York Magazine online.

There are a number of reasons that I thought this deserved a blog entry. First, the book sounds great. Second, the economics department at George Mason is a marvel--a distinguished department within a small, good--though not great--university. The department is home to two Nobel Laureates and one future Nobel Laureate, Larry Iannacconne. Finally, Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution Blog is a favorite of mine.

I'll include some stuff from the book in later posts.

New Gift Idea

Check out this article from DiscoveryNews.com. Only July and already I know what to get my brothers for Christmas...

Noise, not Music

Some friends and I took our kids to the Harry Potter book release party in Harvard Square tonight. There was a free concert. The opening band was ridiculous. It was a three kids between 5 and 8 years old, who couldn't play any instruments. The older boy wailed on a bass guitar and sang off key to ~3000 people in Harvard Yard. I should mention that it really gave me flashbacks to the old days at Fender's Ballroom in Long Beach, CA. (Links to video from Fender's as I remember it and a list of shows--some of which I remember going to.)

Here's a link to their website, so you can get a flavor for their "work." Unfortunately, they were even more off-key and off-lyric tonight.