Jim Bennett says that it’s not always as obvious at the time what should be done, as it is later to the Monday-morning quarterbacks. He compares the Titanic to the World Trade Center. And to Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler in 1938.

One example he points out is relevant to space (you knew I was going to talk about how this is relevant to space, didn’t you?)

Today we ask, “How could Titanic not have enough lifeboats for everybody?” But at the time, it was assumed that lifeboats were only usable in a minority of scenarios, and in most of those scenarios the boats would be used to evacuate passengers from a slowly-sinking ship to another ship, making multiple trips. The general assumption was that it was more productive to concentrate on making the ship as robust as possible. Similarly today we do not design airliners with military-style ejection pods, like those used on bombers, but rather concentrate on making the aircraft as robust as possible.

And similarly, we didn’t design the Shuttle for ejection–the design goal was to make such an eventuality unnecessary, because it was unaffordable to put in that capability. It would have added a lot of extra weight to the vehicle, sacrificing payload, and it would have had a dramatic impact on functionality of the system as planned.

The problem with that philosophy was that they didn’t just save money on the crew-escape system–they also scrimped on the reliability, by using multi-segment solids, instead of liquid boosters, and in not providing adequate testing of the system, because it was too expensive to fly, as designed.

But the lesson is not that manned space transports must have ejection seats–it’s that we need to truly design them to not require them, just as we do airliners.

The recent post on the electoral college raised anew an issue that I often find frustrating in debating policy, particularly when it comes to court decisions, and particularly Supreme Court decisions.

I often find that people have difficulty making a distinction between their position, and the metadiscussion of how they arrive at it. These are two separate discussions, but they continually get conflated in common discourse. That post was not about the merits of the electoral college per se, but rather about the merits of a couple of particular arguments that were made against it.

It is quite possible to believe that a position is correct, while a particular argument for it is weak, or fallacious. In fact, it’s important to be able to articulate and make a good argument (or at least the best one possible) for either side of a case–this is commonly taught (or so I am told) in law school.

While I do happen to think that the current electoral college system is satisfactory (though perhaps increasing the resolution on it so that electors are elected by congressional district, rather than at a state level, might improve it somewhat), I was disagreeing in that post with the quality of the arguments presented, not the position itself.

It is quite possible to agree with (or at least be in favor of) the outcome of, for example, a decision of the Supreme Court, while disagreeing with the reasoning by which it was reached. The case that jumps most immediately to mind here is Roe v. Wade, in which they ruled abortion a right by flawed reasoning and a reading into the Constitution of rights that many believe are not there. Even Justice Ginsberg, I believe, has stated that while she believes herself in a woman’s right to choose to abort her child, she’s troubled by that particular decision on Constitutional grounds.

There are many decisions of the Supreme Court that I view as “wrong” in the sense that they result in a society in which it’s less desirable for me to live, but I agree with them in the sense that they are indeed in concert with the Constitution, which is the criterion on which they’re supposed to be basing their decisions. I don’t understand why more people aren’t capable of making this distinction.

And it’s not just a complaint about topics and modes of discussion on a blog–it has real-world political consequences.

By my view, when the Supremes make a decision that I dislike, but is constitutionally correct, the appropriate response is not to be angry at them, and to start an impeachment drive, or to lobby my senators to put someone on the Court who will make decisions more compatible with my desires (i.e., to rig the process to give me the result I want), but rather, to amend the document whence the decision came.

Unfortunately, it’s easier to play politics and bork judges than it is to amend the founding document, so that’s what politicians do, and because the public rarely makes the distinction, they get away with it.

Jim Bennett has a follow-up email that points out that more than four out of five Brits would like to see the death penalty restored. While the numbers aren’t as high, I’ve seen polls in the other EU countries that indicate that this is a majority opinion there as well.

I assume that the UK and those other places are all examples of those “world’s major democracies” to which the previous post was referring, but as Jim points out, we seem to do a much better job of actually implementing the will of the people over here.

I’m not a constitutional law professor, and I don’t even play one on the internet, but you’d think that real lawyers, who are supposed to have studied the Constitution, and read the Federalist papers and stuff, would know better.

We’ve made a similar argument about the electoral college: if it’s so great, why is it the case that not a single state copies it for the governor’s election, nor does a single other major world democracy use it to pick its president?

I know, they say there are no such things as dumb questions. Considering that these are supposed to be trained attorneys, let’s use this as the exception to make the rule. Anyway, I don’t think that the rule applies to rhetorical questions, which this is clearly intended to be.

There are two constitutional fallacies here. The first is that a state is just a “mini-me” of the federal government. It is not.

It doesn’t strike coins. It doesn’t raise armies. It doesn’t declare and wage war. If it does any of these things, it is put down, brutally, as we saw a hundred forty years ago. To compare the election of a governor to that of a president is to betray a fundamental ignorance of the nature of the federal system.

But even if this were a valid comparison, just how would they propose implementing an electoral college at the state level? There is no entity in a state that fits the following analogy question on an SAT (or, dare I say, LSAT?):

The Federal government is to a state as a state is to a…?

Counties don’t work, because they don’t have representatives to the state government. State senatorial or assembly districts don’t work, because they don’t have governments. Sorry, guys, but this just isn’t one of those recursive things where you can go all the way down to the fleas on fleas ad infinitum. The US federal government is unique, and that part of your question is…dumb.

Second, the question implies, by its use of the word “other,” that the US is a “major world democracy.” Despite the popular usage of the term, it is, simply, not. If these guys had not been cutting class the day they studied the history of the Constitution, they would know that.

Franklin said it best when, walking out of the Constitutional Convention, he was accosted by a woman who asked, “Mr. Franklin, what have you given us?”

He replied, “A Republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

If these lawyers are in any way representative of the legal training in this country, Mr. Franklin’s fears would seem to be well justified.

[Update on Friday morning]

One more thought. Even if we were a “major world democracy,” the argument remains fallacious. It’s a form of the argumentum ad majoritarium, better known as the bandwagon argument. In politics, it takes the form, “Vote for me. Everyone else is, especially all the hip, cool people. You don’t want to be…different, do you?”

It’s a very persuasive (albeit flawed) argument, to those susceptible to fashion and peer pressure.

And of course it’s a favorite with transnationalist types, who use it to fight capital punishment, or promote Kyoto or universal health care, or generally try to increase the level of socialism here.

“We’re so backwards. We’re the only major world democracy that does or doesn’t do X, Y or Z.”

It’s one of their classic fallbacks, after you’ve pointed out the flaws in X, Y or Z. And as we’ve seen on campus, these folks are much more susceptible to peer pressure themselves, rather than logical argumentation, which they often don’t even allow.

And of course, it’s one we used to try on our parents all the time.

“But mooooommm! All the other cool major world democracies are doing it! Why can’t we?”

And if she was a good mom, you remember her response.

“Now honey, if all the other major world democracies were going to jump off a cliff, or dither about taking out psychopathic homicidal nuclear-weapons-seeking maniacs in the Middle East, or directly elect their presidents, would you do it, too?”

“Just because those other countries have leaders who don’t care about you as much as we do doesn’t mean that you can do any silly thing they take into their heads. No, in this house we follow the rules. They’re written down, right here, in this Constitution.”

[Further update]

Anglospherian Jim Bennett makes some further refinements in the comment section that are worth putting up here, just to elaborate further on these guys’ apparent lack of knowledge of not just our own government, but of all the other ones that they seem to admire as well.

Well, actually states do raise armies, but it is true that most of the other characteristics of a sovereign state were folded into Federal sovereignty. Rea raised the critical point, which is that states do not have a “federal nature”; if they had, the Supremes would have let them keep county representation in state Senates. (Even there, there’s some wiggle room. Nothing in the Constitution prevents states from creating a federal structure; if they did, then they might indeed choose to use an electoral college to pick their governor, to help preserve equitability among the constituent regions.)

As to the “other major democracies” argument, there are two points worth raising. One is that actually, many major democracies do use an electoral college approach — it’s called the parliamentary system. In the UK, for example, it’s the majority of parliamentary constituencies that choose the Prime Minister, not a majority of the voters, and sometimes they pick the candidate with fewer votes, as they did in the early Seventies. You can view the electoral college as a special-purpose Parliament with only two functions, to pick the President and the Vice- President; or you can view parliaments as general-purpose Electoral Colleges.

The second point is that whether the US is a democracy depends on your definition of democracy; in the common sense of the word, of course it is one. Technically speaking, it is not a pure representative democracy. Of course, technically speaking, you could argue that it isn’t a republic either — it’s not described as such anywhere in the Constitution. It’s a federal union of states with republican governments. A state could arguably enter the Union with a non-republican government merely by permitting the exception in the treaty of accession, (since treaties are co-equal to the Constitution) and this would not particularly change the character of the Union.

[One more update at 8:30 AM PDT]

Just to preempt any further diversions, I’d like to point out that, in the comments section, amidst a lot of spurious chaff about Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and comparing Glenn Reynolds to a cyber-madrassa, Don Williams accuses me of not putting up a good argument for the electoral college.

He might as well accuse me of not putting up a good argument for going from the present BCS to a college playoff system. It would be equally orthogonal to the point of this post, which was not about whether or not the electoral college is a Good Thing, but about the fact that certain people are attacking it with fallacious and misinformed arguments.

Debating the merits of the electoral college will have to wait for another day, when I have more time and gumption for it. It’s possible to agree that, in fact, we should get rid of the electoral college, and still think that the argument cited above is dumb.

[Via Instantman and Geitner Simmons.]

I’m not a constitutional law professor, and I don’t even play one on the internet, but you’d think that real lawyers, who are supposed to have studied the Constitution, and read the Federalist papers and stuff, would know better.

We’ve made a similar argument about the electoral college: if it’s so great, why is it the case that not a single state copies it for the governor’s election, nor does a single other major world democracy use it to pick its president?

I know, they say there are no such things as dumb questions. Considering that these are supposed to be trained attorneys, let’s use this as the exception to make the rule. Anyway, I don’t think that the rule applies to rhetorical questions, which this is clearly intended to be.

There are two constitutional fallacies here. The first is that a state is just a “mini-me” of the federal government. It is not.

It doesn’t strike coins. It doesn’t raise armies. It doesn’t declare and wage war. If it does any of these things, it is put down, brutally, as we saw a hundred forty years ago. To compare the election of a governor to that of a president is to betray a fundamental ignorance of the nature of the federal system.

But even if this were a valid comparison, just how would they propose implementing an electoral college at the state level? There is no entity in a state that fits the following analogy question on an SAT (or, dare I say, LSAT?):

The Federal government is to a state as a state is to a…?

Counties don’t work, because they don’t have representatives to the state government. State senatorial or assembly districts don’t work, because they don’t have governments. Sorry, guys, but this just isn’t one of those recursive things where you can go all the way down to the fleas on fleas ad infinitum. The US federal government is unique, and that part of your question is…dumb.

Second, the question implies, by its use of the word “other,” that the US is a “major world democracy.” Despite the popular usage of the term, it is, simply, not. If these guys had not been cutting class the day they studied the history of the Constitution, they would know that.

Franklin said it best when, walking out of the Constitutional Convention, he was accosted by a woman who asked, “Mr. Franklin, what have you given us?”

He replied, “A Republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

If these lawyers are in any way representative of the legal training in this country, Mr. Franklin’s fears would seem to be well justified.

[Update on Friday morning]

One more thought. Even if we were a “major world democracy,” the argument remains fallacious. It’s a form of the argumentum ad majoritarium, better known as the bandwagon argument. In politics, it takes the form, “Vote for me. Everyone else is, especially all the hip, cool people. You don’t want to be…different, do you?”

It’s a very persuasive (albeit flawed) argument, to those susceptible to fashion and peer pressure.

And of course it’s a favorite with transnationalist types, who use it to fight capital punishment, or promote Kyoto or universal health care, or generally try to increase the level of socialism here.

“We’re so backwards. We’re the only major world democracy that does or doesn’t do X, Y or Z.”

It’s one of their classic fallbacks, after you’ve pointed out the flaws in X, Y or Z. And as we’ve seen on campus, these folks are much more susceptible to peer pressure themselves, rather than logical argumentation, which they often don’t even allow.

And of course, it’s one we used to try on our parents all the time.

“But mooooommm! All the other cool major world democracies are doing it! Why can’t we?”

And if she was a good mom, you remember her response.

“Now honey, if all the other major world democracies were going to jump off a cliff, or dither about taking out psychopathic homicidal nuclear-weapons-seeking maniacs in the Middle East, or directly elect their presidents, would you do it, too?”

“Just because those other countries have leaders who don’t care about you as much as we do doesn’t mean that you can do any silly thing they take into their heads. No, in this house we follow the rules. They’re written down, right here, in this Constitution.”

[Further update]

Anglospherian Jim Bennett makes some further refinements in the comment section that are worth putting up here, just to elaborate further on these guys’ apparent lack of knowledge of not just our own government, but of all the other ones that they seem to admire as well.

Well, actually states do raise armies, but it is true that most of the other characteristics of a sovereign state were folded into Federal sovereignty. Rea raised the critical point, which is that states do not have a “federal nature”; if they had, the Supremes would have let them keep county representation in state Senates. (Even there, there’s some wiggle room. Nothing in the Constitution prevents states from creating a federal structure; if they did, then they might indeed choose to use an electoral college to pick their governor, to help preserve equitability among the constituent regions.)

As to the “other major democracies” argument, there are two points worth raising. One is that actually, many major democracies do use an electoral college approach — it’s called the parliamentary system. In the UK, for example, it’s the majority of parliamentary constituencies that choose the Prime Minister, not a majority of the voters, and sometimes they pick the candidate with fewer votes, as they did in the early Seventies. You can view the electoral college as a special-purpose Parliament with only two functions, to pick the President and the Vice- President; or you can view parliaments as general-purpose Electoral Colleges.

The second point is that whether the US is a democracy depends on your definition of democracy; in the common sense of the word, of course it is one. Technically speaking, it is not a pure representative democracy. Of course, technically speaking, you could argue that it isn’t a republic either — it’s not described as such anywhere in the Constitution. It’s a federal union of states with republican governments. A state could arguably enter the Union with a non-republican government merely by permitting the exception in the treaty of accession, (since treaties are co-equal to the Constitution) and this would not particularly change the character of the Union.

[One more update at 8:30 AM PDT]

Just to preempt any further diversions, I’d like to point out that, in the comments section, amidst a lot of spurious chaff about Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and comparing Glenn Reynolds to a cyber-madrassa, Don Williams accuses me of not putting up a good argument for the electoral college.

He might as well accuse me of not putting up a good argument for going from the present BCS to a college playoff system. It would be equally orthogonal to the point of this post, which was not about whether or not the electoral college is a Good Thing, but about the fact that certain people are attacking it with fallacious and misinformed arguments.

Debating the merits of the electoral college will have to wait for another day, when I have more time and gumption for it. It’s possible to agree that, in fact, we should get rid of the electoral college, and still think that the argument cited above is dumb.

[Via Instantman and Geitner Simmons.]

I’m not a constitutional law professor, and I don’t even play one on the internet, but you’d think that real lawyers, who are supposed to have studied the Constitution, and read the Federalist papers and stuff, would know better.

We’ve made a similar argument about the electoral college: if it’s so great, why is it the case that not a single state copies it for the governor’s election, nor does a single other major world democracy use it to pick its president?

I know, they say there are no such things as dumb questions. Considering that these are supposed to be trained attorneys, let’s use this as the exception to make the rule. Anyway, I don’t think that the rule applies to rhetorical questions, which this is clearly intended to be.

There are two constitutional fallacies here. The first is that a state is just a “mini-me” of the federal government. It is not.

It doesn’t strike coins. It doesn’t raise armies. It doesn’t declare and wage war. If it does any of these things, it is put down, brutally, as we saw a hundred forty years ago. To compare the election of a governor to that of a president is to betray a fundamental ignorance of the nature of the federal system.

But even if this were a valid comparison, just how would they propose implementing an electoral college at the state level? There is no entity in a state that fits the following analogy question on an SAT (or, dare I say, LSAT?):

The Federal government is to a state as a state is to a…?

Counties don’t work, because they don’t have representatives to the state government. State senatorial or assembly districts don’t work, because they don’t have governments. Sorry, guys, but this just isn’t one of those recursive things where you can go all the way down to the fleas on fleas ad infinitum. The US federal government is unique, and that part of your question is…dumb.

Second, the question implies, by its use of the word “other,” that the US is a “major world democracy.” Despite the popular usage of the term, it is, simply, not. If these guys had not been cutting class the day they studied the history of the Constitution, they would know that.

Franklin said it best when, walking out of the Constitutional Convention, he was accosted by a woman who asked, “Mr. Franklin, what have you given us?”

He replied, “A Republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

If these lawyers are in any way representative of the legal training in this country, Mr. Franklin’s fears would seem to be well justified.

[Update on Friday morning]

One more thought. Even if we were a “major world democracy,” the argument remains fallacious. It’s a form of the argumentum ad majoritarium, better known as the bandwagon argument. In politics, it takes the form, “Vote for me. Everyone else is, especially all the hip, cool people. You don’t want to be…different, do you?”

It’s a very persuasive (albeit flawed) argument, to those susceptible to fashion and peer pressure.

And of course it’s a favorite with transnationalist types, who use it to fight capital punishment, or promote Kyoto or universal health care, or generally try to increase the level of socialism here.

“We’re so backwards. We’re the only major world democracy that does or doesn’t do X, Y or Z.”

It’s one of their classic fallbacks, after you’ve pointed out the flaws in X, Y or Z. And as we’ve seen on campus, these folks are much more susceptible to peer pressure themselves, rather than logical argumentation, which they often don’t even allow.

And of course, it’s one we used to try on our parents all the time.

“But mooooommm! All the other cool major world democracies are doing it! Why can’t we?”

And if she was a good mom, you remember her response.

“Now honey, if all the other major world democracies were going to jump off a cliff, or dither about taking out psychopathic homicidal nuclear-weapons-seeking maniacs in the Middle East, or directly elect their presidents, would you do it, too?”

“Just because those other countries have leaders who don’t care about you as much as we do doesn’t mean that you can do any silly thing they take into their heads. No, in this house we follow the rules. They’re written down, right here, in this Constitution.”

[Further update]

Anglospherian Jim Bennett makes some further refinements in the comment section that are worth putting up here, just to elaborate further on these guys’ apparent lack of knowledge of not just our own government, but of all the other ones that they seem to admire as well.

Well, actually states do raise armies, but it is true that most of the other characteristics of a sovereign state were folded into Federal sovereignty. Rea raised the critical point, which is that states do not have a “federal nature”; if they had, the Supremes would have let them keep county representation in state Senates. (Even there, there’s some wiggle room. Nothing in the Constitution prevents states from creating a federal structure; if they did, then they might indeed choose to use an electoral college to pick their governor, to help preserve equitability among the constituent regions.)

As to the “other major democracies” argument, there are two points worth raising. One is that actually, many major democracies do use an electoral college approach — it’s called the parliamentary system. In the UK, for example, it’s the majority of parliamentary constituencies that choose the Prime Minister, not a majority of the voters, and sometimes they pick the candidate with fewer votes, as they did in the early Seventies. You can view the electoral college as a special-purpose Parliament with only two functions, to pick the President and the Vice- President; or you can view parliaments as general-purpose Electoral Colleges.

The second point is that whether the US is a democracy depends on your definition of democracy; in the common sense of the word, of course it is one. Technically speaking, it is not a pure representative democracy. Of course, technically speaking, you could argue that it isn’t a republic either — it’s not described as such anywhere in the Constitution. It’s a federal union of states with republican governments. A state could arguably enter the Union with a non-republican government merely by permitting the exception in the treaty of accession, (since treaties are co-equal to the Constitution) and this would not particularly change the character of the Union.

[One more update at 8:30 AM PDT]

Just to preempt any further diversions, I’d like to point out that, in the comments section, amidst a lot of spurious chaff about Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and comparing Glenn Reynolds to a cyber-madrassa, Don Williams accuses me of not putting up a good argument for the electoral college.

He might as well accuse me of not putting up a good argument for going from the present BCS to a college playoff system. It would be equally orthogonal to the point of this post, which was not about whether or not the electoral college is a Good Thing, but about the fact that certain people are attacking it with fallacious and misinformed arguments.

Debating the merits of the electoral college will have to wait for another day, when I have more time and gumption for it. It’s possible to agree that, in fact, we should get rid of the electoral college, and still think that the argument cited above is dumb.

[Via Instantman and Geitner Simmons.]

Spaceref has an interesting editorial from a NASA employee who apparently requires a great deal of gruntling. And he understands the problem.

It is because the political answers are used in a political Congress that the Agency drifts on from crisis to crisis. It is because the political answers are used that management has become, very nearly to the grass roots level, political rather than technical. Key decisions costing and distributing millions and billions of dollars are made on a political basis rather than a technical one. Political achievement is rewarded, not technical achievement. Frosting over all of this is the utter hypocrisy pushed constantly by our leaders that the opposite is true, that technologists are wanted and valued and desperately needed when even a blind technologist can see the plain truth before him.

You can’t make this stuff up.

A grizzly sow mauled a group of PETA members hiking in Yellowstone.

She’s obviously not a member of BETH (Bears for the Ethical Treatment of Humans). Or then again, perhaps she is…

The competition was stiff, but Bangladesh has nosed out second-place Nigeria to be named the world’s most corrupt country.

Way to go!

In your face, Lagos! You’re going to have to come up with something better than those stupid “I’ve got a bazillion dollars that I need help getting out of the country” spams.

Better luck next year.

The competition was stiff, but Bangladesh has nosed out second-place Nigeria to be named the world’s most corrupt country.

Way to go!

In your face, Lagos! You’re going to have to come up with something better than those stupid “I’ve got a bazillion dollars that I need help getting out of the country” spams.

Better luck next year.