I don't understand opposition to the Iran deal

If you want to have an expert opinion, and don't have years to dedicate to becoming an expert on something, just agree with the consensus of experts. And as I mentioned in my last post, in a poll of international relations experts, only 10% said that the Iran nuclear deal would have a negative effect.

But of the experts that do believe the Iran deal is bad, what is their reasoning?

I recently heard John Bolton on the Banter podcast explain his view on why the deal is bad. And I just don't get it. He thinks we shouldn't lift sanctions in exchange for their reduction and allowed-inspection of their nuclear program because he doesn't think they'll follow their end of the bargain. So what does he say they'll do instead?

"play Ms. Goody Two-Shoes for the next 6 months or so to get the sanctions lifted"

Of course, if they go back on their deal, then the sanctions are supposed to be re-applied. But he says we won't be able to get other countries to agree to re-apply the sanctions. I don't know why I should believe that, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt. What affects does he think the sanctions have on their nuclear program?

"I've never believed that (our sanctions) imposed real hardship... The sanctions did not slow down the nuclear program"

OK, so by his own words, if Iran breaks the deal and doesn't get their sanctions re-applied, then their nuclear program is slowed down by the 6+ months they spent playing nice, and it's not sped up by any other factor. So... wouldn't that be good? What does he think we should do instead?

"The overwhelmingly most likely outcome here - deal or no deal - is Iran gets nuclear weapons... There are only 2 options ... either Iran gets nuclear weapons (the most likely outcome), or somebody uses military force to prevent that from happening."

What!? So the deal is bad because the only good option is war? Even if war is the only alternative to Iran getting a nuclear weapon, I don't understand why making a deal that you believe they'll break reduces the likelihood of us doing that.


In other Iran-nuclear-deal-news... "United Against Nuclear Iran" is a think-tank opposed to the deal, and their president just had to step down because he has decided that the deal is good.

Team America: World Police

In Iraq, the U.S. intervened and occupied, and the result was a costly disaster. In Libya, the U.S. intervened and did not occupy, and the result was a costly disaster. In Syria, the U.S. neither intervened nor occupied, and the result is a costly disaster.

--  link

I think ideological pacifism is wrong. There have to be many cases where the right application of our military can make the world a drastically better place. But how confident can we really be in whether any given idea is one of those cases? Isn't this an area where we have to admit human beings just haven't figured out how to predict the results of our actions yet?

I struggle with how to think about this issue. Since the upside of getting military intervention right could be so high, I don't want to take a stance that prevents us from figuring out how to achieve that massive potential upside.

But to a large extent, it seems like we have to have a strong default pacifism in practice. Not because we should believe any given intervention is going to have worse results than not intervening - but precisely because we don't know. Either choice is like rolling a die. The number it lands on is massively important. But going to war means spending tons of money, killing a bunch of innocent people (our own people and accidents in the other country), and then rolling the die, while choosing not to intervene is just rolling the die without doing that. Which one sounds better?

Also there was an interesting poll recently that asked "international relations experts" and the general public questions about when a U.S. military intervention would be a good idea. In general, the experts were far less likely to support it than the general public. For instance, to the question "Would you support or oppose taking military action if it were certain
Iran was close to producing a nuclear weapon?", 63% of the public supported it, whereas only 22% of the experts did. I found that really surprising! Also, less than 10% of the experts thought that the recent Iran nuclear deal would have a negative impact.

Terrorist Furniture

Terrorism, often cited as the greatest threat to America today, kills about as many Americans as furniture.

-- link

Public Opinion

I don't trust any poll on complex public policy issues, because the answer entirely depends on framing. Indeed it's even worse than you might think. It's not a question of finding the public's "true beliefs," as there is no such thing. Trying to find true beliefs is like trying to nail jello to the wall. You can change opinion by simply asking a question. (Insert Heisenberg Uncertainty analogy here.) Thus if you asked people if they'd rather spend $4 million executing a killer or $2 million on life imprisonment, the simple reporting of the relative costs might sway people against the death penalty, as most now assume the death penalty is cheaper. They'd learn something merely by listening to the question, and that would affect their opinion.

If you say we should ask the most basic question possible, untainted by any information that might sway opinion, then you are asking for the most ignorant views of the public. Is that what you want---pure untainted ignorance?

-- Scott Sumner on Econlog

Please let this correlation be a fluke: imitative violence edition

Heavyweight championship prize fights that receive coverage on network evening news appear to produce measurable increases in the U.S. homicide rate. This analysis of heavyweight championship fights (between 1973 and 1978) is perhaps most compelling in its demonstration of the remarkably specific nature of the imitative aggression that is generated. When such a match was lost by a black fighter, the homicide rate during the following ten days rose significantly for young black male victims but not young white males. On the other hand, when a white fighter lost a match, it was young white men but not young black men who were killed more frequently in the next ten days.

-- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Political convenience vs changes in US poverty

When discussing government welfare programs, and specifically the "War on Poverty", you'll often see liberals and conservatives disagree over how effective it was at helping the poor. Sometimes you'll even see conservatives claim that poverty has not improved since then at all, by pointing to some poverty statistics while ignoring the distinction between relative/absolute poverty, cuts to those anti-poverty programs, increased immigration of poor people since those programs started, the fact that the benefits of many of these anti-poverty programs are not even counted against whether to count someone as poor in the cited statistics, the nuance between counting income or consumption, etc.

Then when discussing the plight of the US poor today, and especially when discussing the significance of increased inequality since around the 1970s, which is almost about the same time period as looking at America after the "War on Poverty" programs were put into place, the roles reverse. Liberals will sometimes try very hard to show that the poor have not had any improvement since then, and conservatives will sometimes try very hard to show the opposite, often by pointing out the same considerations they ignore when trying to show that the War on Poverty did not result in the poor being any better off.

I thought about this yesterday when reading a conservative book that seemed to make this contradictory switch within the very same book. People are funny.

Your life divided by the universe

Just thought this was interesting, on the latest Rationally Speaking podcast about nihilism:

There's a fair amount of psychological research showing that when we evaluate an act of charity, we don't judge it based on the absolute amount of good that it would accomplish, like the absolute number of lives. We judge it based on the amount of good it would accomplish relative to the size of the problem. For example, one study found that people cared more, and were willing to donate more money, to save 4500 refugees if they were told that was 4500 out of a camp of 11,000 refugees, as opposed to 4500 out of a camp of 250,000 refugees. In both cases the same number of lives were at stake, but in the latter case, saving those lives just seemed less worthwhile or meaningful because they seemed like a drop in the ocean. In fact, this effect even holds up in more extreme ways, in which people will save fewer lives if those lives are out of a smaller denominator, as opposed to saving more lives that are of a bigger denominator. So we're sort of focused on the ratio, which is a little depressing. But the reason that I bring this up is that, I think that the discovery of just how enormous the universe really is, is a big part of many people's sensation that life lacks meaning. So, whatever the stakes of our petty human lives ... you divide that by the size of the universe, and to our brains it just seems to lack all meaning or purpose. But I think that's just a feature of our brains. ... The way that I got past that point was to realize that our choice of denominator is arbitrary. ... Once I got to the point where the denominator feels arbitrary, then I can just pick whichever denominator allows me to continue on sensibly with my life.