First Hand Data

experiences that changed my thinking

Most of what I know is based on secondhand information; I have never seen Antarctica but am confident that it exists. Some, however, is first hand. I mentioned one example in my previous post, an experience during a summer spent in Washington as a congressional intern in my early twenties that demonstrated that competent academics, people I liked, were willing to do deliberately dishonest work. That was convincing in a way that second-hand information, an article arguing that published work was dishonest — I have written some — would not have been.

Thinking about that started me looking for other examples of views of mine based on my own experiences. Here are some of them.

An Honest Academic

Many years later, when I was a faculty fellow at the University of Chicago law school, I had another experience that provided me with a different reason for skepticism of orthodoxies. I got into a conversation about deterrence with Norval Morris, a colleague who had played a prominent role in prison reform and related issues. He confidently told me that deterrence did not work, in particular that Ehrlich’s article finding a strong deterrent effect from the death penalty had been debunked and Ehrlich himself had refused to share his data with other scholars who wanted to check his results. I asked Morris to point me at evidence confirming his claims and he pointed me at a book of articles, I think lent me a copy.

I read it. None of the articles supported his claims. The only material that did was the introduction by the editors which offered possible explanations of how the evidence for deterrence in the articles might be mistaken — but no evidence that it was. There was one article, I think in that book but perhaps in something else I read, by someone who had been given Ehrlich’s data and succeeded in duplicating his results.

I reported this to Norval. His response was that he had not actually read the book; it was written by friends of his and he had told me what they told him.

The interesting part is that I was convinced that he was an honest man. He had told me things that were part of the orthodoxy in the circles he moved in, was willing to admit that he did not actually know the evidence for them, only that it existed, which he knew because friends he trusted told him that it did; he too depended mostly on second-hand information. The combination of that experience and the earlier experience of deliberate dishonesty gave me reason to be skeptical of academic orthodoxies, at least in any field where people had an incentive, political or ideological, to believe them. That is part of the reason for, among other things, my later work skeptical of first the population scare of fifty years ago, later the current climate orthodoxy.

Losing an Argument

When I was a Harvard undergraduate in my late teens I encountered Isaiah Berlin, a prominent philosopher who was visiting the university, and we got into an argument over the nature of moral propositions. My view at the time was that they were tastes, that stealing was worse than not stealing in the same sense that vanilla ice cream was worse than chocolate. His view, at least the view he defended, was that moral propositions were facts of reality, like physical propositions, that just as I observed the physical universe with my physical senses I observed the moral universe with my moral senses. He defended that claim not by arguing that the evidence for moral facts was stronger than I believed but that the evidence for physical facts was weaker, hence that the evidence for the moral facts that I perceived was not much weaker than for the physical facts I perceived, both ultimately based on believing information from my senses, physical and moral.

For a more detailed account of the argument and the view of moral philosophy it left me with, see the chapter I wrote about it.

Police Officers

When I was living in Philadelphia with my first wife we happened to be witnesses to a shooting, as a result had friendly conversations with several police officers. One of them offered me advice on what I should do if someone broke into my house and I shot him. The two essential things were to make sure he was dead and to make sure his body ended up inside the house. It was probably good advice but it was also, by implication, advice to do illegal things.

My next interaction with police was less friendly. I was in the New Orleans airport late in the evening waiting for my flight home, accompanied by some students who had attended the same event. We were sitting in a location where we would have been in the way if the airport had been busy, but it was in fact almost empty. A police officer told us to move. We moved to another location after looking at the officer, who didn’t seem to object to that one. A while later he came over and again asked us to move.

At that point one of the students asked the officer for his badge number, I assume with the intent of putting in a complaint, and the officer arrested all of us. He put handcuffs on me, presumably because I was the oldest member of the group, marched us through the airport to be driven to the local prison. I flew home the next day and charges were eventually dropped.

The interesting thing was that, in conversation with other officers, he did not pretend that we had refused to move when asked, although that was what we were being charged with. It was clear from our conversation with the officer who drove us to the prison that he interpreted what had happened as our being rude to an officer and his responding, as we should have expected, by making me miss my flight and the others spend the night in jail.

My conclusion from both incidents was that police officers are not particularly law abiding. That may have been part of the reason why, in my later work on law and economics, I treated the incentives of enforcers as part of the problem instead of simply assuming that they would do whatever they were supposed to.

Becoming an Athlete

Through high school and college I took it for granted that I was bad at athletic activities. The only high school sport at which I was not obviously below average was wrestling, partly because I had been doing judo outside of school which gave me some practice at something similar. At judo I was neither obviously good or obviously bad and there were not enough others doing it to give me a good basis of comparison.

In graduate school I got involved with founding a mid-west branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism, a historical recreation group started on the West Coast a few years earlier. One of the group’s activities was a sport based on medieval foot combat. The basic logic of what we were (and are) doing was that if you really fight using real weapons and real armor you get really dead, but if you use real armor and fake weapons, swords of a realistic size and weight made of rattan instead of iron or steel, you can really fight, treat it as a competitive sport rather than as acting, and usually get nothing worse than bruises. It was a new sport and I turned out to be good at it, for several years one of the top SCA fighters in the eastern half of the country.

I concluded that the reason I had thought I was unathletic was that the sports I encountered in gym class were what the other kids did for fun on their own time. Competing in a sport that was new for all of us was a different game. I was strong for my size with fast reactions and that was enough to put me well above average.

The Lesson of Crystalized Intelligence

My parents had a vacation home at Sea Ranch, a coastal development two or three hours north of San Francisco. My wife and I with our two children were visiting when there was a fire, burning trees and houses just north of theirs. My father, told that we had seen it, did not react to the emergency until he came out and saw it himself, at which point he did a very competent job of getting all of us out of the house and south along the coast.

He was one of the most intelligent people I have ever known, so I was puzzled at his initial failure to react to the information until I remembered what I had read about the difference between fluid and crystalized intelligence. Fluid intelligence is working out the solution to a problem. Crystallized intelligence is remembering the solution you found to a similar problem encountered before and using that. As people get older, they tend to switch from fluid intelligence to crystalized, perhaps because they have a longer past to mine for past solutions and a shorter future in which to apply answers new found.

My father, who was in his eighties, had, I conjecture, never encountered a dangerous fire before, responded to the information that one was there by ignoring it. Only when he saw the fire for himself did he recognize that this was a new situation requiring a new answer, switched from crystalized to fluid intelligence to find one.

About twenty years later I was on a speaking trip in Europe. My son Bill emailed to urge me to abandon the trip, fly home and isolate against the Covid pandemic, then in its early stages.

I ignored the first few emails. I had lived for seventy some years, done many such speaking trips, never encountered a danger sufficient to make me cut one short. Then I remembered my father, the fire, the distinction between fluid and crystalized intelligence. I cancelled my last few talks, flew home, spent more than a year isolating with my wife and our (adult) children until vaccines were available and all four of us had gotten them.

The Lesson of WoW

When World of Warcraft came out I got it, spent a good deal of time playing, was eventually joined by my wife and children. Doing instances with a group I discovered that the other players were much better at keeping track of where people were, how to get there, the map of the instance we were working through, than I was. I eventually adopted the practice, when working with a group, of warning the others of my limitation.

One of the patterns of male/female differences is supposed to be that men are, on average, better at map reading tasks. My wife used to make her living as a geologist doing three dimensional mapping for Shell Oil. I, as I used to put when playing WoW, can get lost on a table top.

It is useful to discover what you are good at, as in my discovery that I was good at SCA sword fighting, hence not unathletic by nature. It is also useful to discover what you are bad at.

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