The Burst of a Bubble

This has been a very odd season to be a sports fan.  Investing oneself in your favorite team is something normal to do.  But this time around it seemed so much more urgent.  Everything else, especially Covid and our national politics, but then all those other activities that have been influenced by those two, has made people either want to crawl into a hole or work themselves into a furious rage. Watching sports and rooting for your favorite team then took on an added burden for many fans.  It was more than just a source of entertainment.  It was salvation from everything else that seemed so dismal.  And it could be done safely, watching TV from your living room, then perhaps going on the Internet and gobbling up all the post game information and gossip. 

You have to wonder whether those who promote pro and college sports understood this enough to deliberately hype things, as a way of intensifying the fans emotions about their favorite team. Since I'm an economist by training as well as a long time Illinois fan, it occurred to me during the shellacking that Loyola gave to Illinois yesterday, which followed Ohio State and Purdue each losing in the round of 64, other Big Ten teams that were favored in their respective games, that the moniker - best conference in the country - which the Big Ten claimed and repeated over and over again, was just like an overinflated asset, which happens when there is a bubble.  Eventually the bubble bursts and the asset price falls dramatically thereafter. The NCAA Tournament games seemingly put the lie to the assertion that the Big Ten was the best conference.  This was especially true for Illinois, which many who filled out brackets had reaching the Championship game, and quite a few of them thought Illinois would win it all.  In retrospect, how could that be?

Ironically, in my previous post I wrote that once the conference season starts we no longer get performance comparisons of teams across conferences.  Those teams that improve a lot may then go under the radar. But I was mistakenly arrogant in writing that post.  I thought Illinois was such a team and I was making an argument for why it might be better than Gonzaga, the overall #1 seed. I didn't consider less hyped teams that might have improved in this way, or teams in a major conference that played their conference season like major league baseball teams play spring training, but then turn up the heat during the NCAA Tournament.  That too is possible.  Indeed, seeing the outcomes from yesterday, it appears more likely that is what happened.  But I should caution about something I learned from Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.  In small samples, outlier outcomes are not all that unlikely.  Since the NCAA Tournament is one and done, we don't see the repeat experiment of the same teams matched up, the way they are in the NBA playoffs.  I don't want to critique the one and done aspect.  It adds to the excitement for everyone.  But it does make for less confidence in the outcome as a determinant of the better team.  Everyone can have a bad day, even the best of teams. Best out of five does a better job in reducing the role of luck.  Best out of seven is even better that way.  

My previous post also talked about the issue of match ups.  Loyola plays Oregon State in the Sweet Sixteen.  It might be that Illinois is more likely to beat Oregon State than Loyola is, yet Loyola is more likely to beat Illinois.  I don't know this for a fact, but it is possible.  I'll have more to say about this particular issue below.  

For the rest of this post, I want to focus specifically on Illinois, partly because that's the team I've watched and so have a bunch of questions about them, and partly to illustrate how a bubble might form in evaluating a team (or a conference) well above its true ability.  

1.  Was Illinois exceedingly nervous before the game with Loyola began?

There was a camera shot of Kofi Cockburn during the warm up.  He looked grim.  He normally is smiling then and joking with his teammates.  This time around that wasn't happening.  I didn't see other players in the warmup regarding their facial expressions and/or I don't have a firm impression about how they normally would look.  But I did take note of Kofi.  Was it just him or the whole team?  And, if it was the whole time, why was that?  I read some newspaper pieces that suggested it was the whole team - Illinois had lost the game before it started and that was confirmed in the first 3 minutes.  

It may be difficult to learn about this soon.  I can imagine Brad Underwood and the rest of the coaching staff having a rule (for the entire season, not just this game) that what's said in the locker room stays in the locker room.  Yet for having a long term relationship with the fans that doesn't turn sour, something about this needs true comments from the coaches and maybe also from the players.  This doesn't have to happen immediately, but should not be too long in the offing after the Final Four. 

2.  Illinois is strictly a man to man team these days.  Why is that?

In particular, why not a 1-3-1 zone, so Kofi can stay near the basket always, even with a big man who is a good passer (Krutwig of Loyola) and/or a big man who can shoot the three (Garza of Iowa, Hunter Dickinson of Michigan, and perhaps others in the Big Ten).  Further, a zone makes it easier for there to be weak side help on a play in the paint.  Loyola repeatedly ran a curl around Krutwig.  The Illinois defender would be lagging on the play, giving an easy lane to the basket for what looked like a backdoor play.   Then too, for teams that space the floor offensively, a zone allows more opportunity to trap and double team.   There is the old idea that goes back to Vince Lombardi and maybe is even older than that, which is to have a basic mode of operation and then do that very very well through repeated practice.  It's one approach.  The team doesn't adjust to the situation.  The team imposes their will on the other team.  If you're the Green Bay Packers in the glory days, fine.  But if you're good yet not truly great, why not make situational adjustments, which require more than one defensive approach in the arsenal?

I know there are some arguments against a zone.  If the opponent has several good three-point shooters, the zone will likely give them better looks.  And it may be that the type of man to man that Brad Underwood teaches his players makes them more aggressive defensively, yet without fouling (so much).  But I felt in the Loyola game we should have played it, or at least have the weak side defenders help out on the curl so that the back door play wasn't there.  We never did that and as a viewer I found that disappointing.  

3. I'm a big fan of Ayo as all Illini fans are, yet he does have some weaknesses.  Those are never talked about.  Why is that?

Ayo is loosey-goosey on the dribble and sometimes turns it over as a consequence.  He has a well known predilection for going right.  When he's double teamed and one of the defenders block his path to the right, he is more vulnerable to turnovers.  We saw this earlier in the season when we lost to Ohio State.  Ayo made some adjustments after that, to dribble left before going right or to dribble left down the lane.  It seemed that Loyola modified the defensive approach by having the double team start closer to mid court.  This gets to the next point.

Ayo is sometimes loosey-goosey on the pass as well. When he passes to the wing so a teammate can shoot a three-pointer, the passes are strong and hard.  But when he is setting up an alley-oop play, he floats the ball very softly and is sometimes off the mark.  I didn't chart this precisely, but when Loyola trapped Ayo, he tried to get out of it with the dribble, not with a pass.  That Loyola trapped Ayo meant that some other Illinois player was open.  But Ayo didn't find the open man.  I conjecture that he is very good at passing to wing players when he is driving the lane, familiar territory for him, but he is much less comfortable making such a long pass from elsewhere on the court, or so it seemed. 

Ayo has taken the team on his back and won ballgames for Illinois by doing that.  His level of play would rise near the end of the game.  Then he'd go into superhero mode.  In the Loyola game, it seemed he was trying to take the team on his back after only a few minutes, when Illinois had fallen behind by a score of 9 to 2.  It may have been better for him to share this burden with some of his teammates rather than assume it all himself.  Did he understand that himself?

I thought Adam Miller seemed comfortable and relaxed, especially after he made a couple of three pointers.  He was the only Illinois guard who seemed that way. Maybe he should have gotten more responsibility with the ball, rather than always setting up on the wing.  As it was, Ayo would walk the ball up the court - Illinois couldn't fast break - and that looked grim.  Sometimes grim determination is needed to get beyond an obstacle.  In this case, however, I'd have liked Illinois to try something else.  Punching Adam Miller's ticket in this game made sense to me, either by him bringing up the ball or by Ayo passing to him after Ayo could see the trap coming.  I believe this even if in previous games in the Big Ten Tournament Adam Miller seemed somewhat out of control at times. 

Let me speculate a moment about Ayo's future. There has been a lot of hype about him being ready for the NBA.  Does a player's stock in the draft drop based on one poor performance?  If it turned out that the injury he suffered was still bothering him more than anyone outside of the team knew, that all the hype about the mask would have been a useful diversion, and that given some rest Ayo can return to full health, then I think Ayo's performance against Loyola can be disregarded.   But if Ayo was in near full health in that game, the mask notwithstanding, then the NBA teams might be wary of drafting him, for fear that his weaknesses would get even more exploited in the NBA.   

On the other hand, since I'm a big adherent of learning via deliberate practice, can Ayo get the right sort of practice that he needs to improve on these weaknesses by staying in college?  I doubt it.  There aren't enough other teams that can trap effectively and/or pick up the Illini at mid court.  There is something called the NBA G League, which is the NBA's minor league for player development.  I would think that might be where Ayo ends up next.   An alternative is to play overseas.  But he'd be away from his family then and with Covid, that might seem too much of discontinuity now.  I'll add one last thing here.  ESPN had a column where several commentators wrote about the Big Ten's poor performance in the Tournament, after the fact.  One of them explained that the talent level overall is really not that high.  Big Ten schools don't recruit players for just one year of play and then off to the NBA.  Many of the very top players want to go that route.   If the conference overall has been overrated, that factor may be missed.  It's something to consider.

4. The role of the media.  Do they simply report the sports news or are they "experts" whose opinion tends to be spot on?  If they are experts, how did they miss this one?

Before getting to TV, let me make a quick mention about the News-Gazette, the local newspaper in Champaign-Urbana. Simply measured by number of pages devoted to the Illini basketball team and featuring individual player pages with huge photos of them, the News-Gazette has really hyped the team, well beyond their normal coverage.  And, since the team itself set its goal to win the NCAA Championship, the paper plugged that as well.  

As to TV, last week before the tournament started, MSNBC had a segment of their Morning Joe show where the guest was Jay Bilas, the college basketball guru.  He appeared along with their regular news commentators.  In talking about Illinois, while there had already been a lot of hype about Ayo's mask, and what it should be called, Bilas pulled a new one (at least for me). He referred to Ayo as Batman (DC Comics), others had also done that, and to Kofi as the Incredible Hulk (Marvel Comics), I hadn't heard that one before.  With both Batman and the Incredible Hulk, how could Illinois lose?

Ditto all the commentators who along with the play by play guy call the games.  Everyone I've listened to all season long (please retire Dick Vitale, you too Dan Dakich, since both of you give more parenthetic remarks than provide insights into what is happening in the game) have been extremely high on Illinois.  There has not been an inkling from them about weaknesses the Illini have, until yesterday.  Does this sort of thing expose them as mouth pieces only, not real experts?  

A more cynical view would take account of sports betting, which has been in the news a lot recently in regard to college basketball.  Do those who bet seriously listen to the commentators?  Do the commentators themselves bet on games, including games they call.  The ultimate cynicism would be about the possibility where the commentator bets one way and yet on TV influences the fans to take the opposite position, so the commentator can get better odds.  I hope that's not happening.  I prefer them being somewhat clueless to being very savvy while highly manipulative. 

Wrap Up

Was Illinois a really good team that just had a bad day yesterday? Or did all the Illini fans get caught up in the confirmation bias about how great the team was, so simply weren't prepared that they were good but not great and might lose to other teams aside from the #1 seeds?  I don't know.  I hope at some point in the not too distant future we learn which of those is right.

In the meantime, I've now got to decide whether I'll watch more of the Tournament.  There are still 3 Big Ten teams left.  Let's see if any of them can stick around for a while longer.

College Basketball - Rankings, Brackets, Subjective Probabilities and Not Enough Data

Like many fans of Illinois, including some non-true ones like me who haven't watched for many years, I've become taken with this year's team.  Not only would I watch the game, but during the Big Ten Tournament I'd go online and look for what is made available about the game once it was over.  I discovered after game press conferences held in Zoom, with coaches and players from each team.  I actually found that listening to the opposing coach was more informative - I already knew a lot about the Illini without hearing it from the players and coaches, though that was entertaining too.  The bit from the coaches of the other team that caught my attention was how much they talked about the players learning, even at this late stage of the season, so that their performance would improve and their team would get better.  The expectation of such learning seemed paramount.  And this was from coaches of teams that would make the NCAA tournament.  Indeed, Iowa and Ohio State were each given a 2 seed in their respective brackets.  How much better can they get?

Unlike just about every other fan, I engage in math modeling of social/political/economic situations.  It's what I learned to do in graduate school and later as a faculty member, when my research was in economic theory. Somewhat surprising to me at the time, I continued to do this when I switched careers and became an administrator in educational technology.  There were some obvious changes with the career switch.  I no longer tried to publish these models.  And for the most part they were remarkably simple, much more so than the models I did try to publish earlier in my career.  The simplicity helped in communicating the ideas to others who weren't versed in modeling of this sort.  And they helped me enormously in supporting my thinking.  Indeed, often I would generate such a model with no apparent effort whatsoever.  

I'm going to do something similar here - no math, just a talkie discussion of the modeling issues.  I hope that anybody else who reads this gets the gist of what I'm saying, which is based on listening to those coaches talking about player and team learning.

Let's talk a little about inference via chains of connection. A plays B (and some outcome is determined).  Then B plays C (another outcome).   And C plays D (still another outcome).  At this point some inference can be made between A and D, which of them is better or are they approximately equal.  This happens even though A never played D.   Chain inferences of this sort underlie the ratings. 

The regular season is broken up into two main components.  The first is the preseason, with about 1/3 of the total number of regular season games.  Preseason games form chains among all the teams within Division 1. (With Google I learned that there are 350 teams in Division 1 and 7 more that are transitioning from Division 2.)  The remaining 2/3 of the games are played within a Conference in which the school is a member.  (There are 7 Independents.  I believe there used to be many more, but it then became difficult to schedule games with other schools in a Conference during the Conference season.)  There are roughly 30 games in the entire season and then the postseason begins with the Conference Tournament.  Once the Conference Season starts, we get a lot of information about how Conference teams compare with one another, but we no longer get fresh information about how they compare with out of Conference teams, until the NCAA Tournament is played. 

Regarding the outcome of any particular game, apart from which team wins, I would break the outcomes into three categories: 1) nail-biter,  2) convincing win, and 3) blowout.   I'm not going to try to come up with formal ways to differentiate these but among the things I look at instinctively are: a) score at the 2:00 minute mark compared with final score, b) when the subs who otherwise don't play much get put into the game, and c) body language of the opposing team late in the game.  My view is that these categories serve as a useful summary of the outcome. 

With this background, let's get to the model.  Every team is characterized by its quality, q, a vertical parameter.  When two teams play, the one with the higher value of q is more likely to win.  It's the difference in the quality parameters across the teams that determines the distribution over outcomes.  This is an abstract characterization.  Let's consider what it rules out.  For one, home team advantage is not considered.  In a non-Covid season, home team advantage clearly matters, the fans spur the players on and the refs sometimes get caught up in that. I don't disagree but it's not in the model, because if it were that would complicate things and we want to keep things simple.  Another factor that is sometimes mentioned is matchup - a team plays well against man-to-man defense but struggles against the zone, then the type of defense the opponent plays matters for the outcome. That too is not included, again to keep things simple.  

One other point to consider is to translate the rankings into the quality of teams.   The rankings are ordinal.  Number 1 is the best, but might number 2 be very close or not?  The rankings would be the same either way.  So these quality parameters have more information in them than the rankings do.  The quality parameters give a cardinal ranking in that differences in quality do matter. 

Returning to the model, the quality parameter evolves over the course of the season.  Teams get better via the learning the coaches describe.  There may be reasons for quality to drop, which we should consider as well. One obvious reason is for there to be a significant injury to a key player on the team.  Another might be attitudinal.  If a team is on a losing streak because of the luck of a the draw in the scheduling as well as other random factors, it might lose some if its competitive edge.  (I'm writing this after reading about Indiana and Minnesota in the Big Ten firing their coaches.  For players who are not graduating this year, the prospect of a new coach may be daunting.  While the firings happened after the end of the season for those teams, if the players anticipate that possibility earlier it could impact their play.)

Now the key point.  The learning effect which says that quality will grow may be different from team to team.  To make progress here, let's focus on the conference season.  Then we might might break the overall learning effect for a team into a conference growth component, common to all teams in the same conference and a team idiosyncratic effect.  The latter average out to zero so that in aggregate the learning of the teams in the conference happens at the conference rate.  Those rates may differ from one conference to another. 

Now we'll take another step back.  If one team has very high quality and it is playing another team of mediocre quality,  the first team might learn a lot from a loss or a nail-biter win, the proverbial wake up call, but there is little to no learning from a convincing win or a blowout of the other team.  So at the team level, growth will be higher on average when even the weaker teams in the conference have a decent chance at winning and where most games are reasonably close.  

Now let's consider individual player growth.  Much of this happens from one season to the next, where the player works on his game during the off season.  This sort of thing happens at any level.  But for a freshman who gets a fair amount of playing time, the adjustment from high school basketball to college basketball is huge.  Such players might grow the most during their first season, although not all of them will rise to the occasion.  Transfer students might be next on the list.  They played under one system at their old school and then have to adjust to the new system and their role on it.  Then there is the situation where a key player goes down with a severe injury and the roles of others on the team must change as a consequence. This can produce a lot of learning, both by the players and by the coaching staff, which hasn't seen the players perform in their new roles.  This gives some reason why the rate of team learning may depart from the average for the conference. 

Of course there is another reason this year.  Covid has knocked many teams off their ordinary rhythms.  With some players testing positive and teams having to quarantine, so unable to practice and engage in ordinary team camaraderie outside of practice, that surely made for a setback for those teams who have gone through it.  Afterwards, could they eventually return to the level of play they had achieved before?  Who knows?

I'm going to try to wrap up now with two observations about this year's tournament.  What quality does Gonzaga have? It is undefeated and the number 1 seed overall.  That is agreed upon.  But does it have the highest quality? Or might Illinois, which was good but not great last December, have passed Gonzaga in quality because the Big Ten Conference produced a lot more team learning, and Illinois had the right mix of freshman, transfers and upperclassman to have a very high learning rate.  In particular, the blowout loss to Michigan State, where Ayo Dosunmu had a concussion and his nose was broken, might have jump started team learning for all the other Illini players regarding all in effort on defense and a raised efficacy on offense.  As an enthusiastic fan, I watched this performance.  I want it to be true that Illinois now has the highest q, no doubt. But on what evidence could I make that determination?  Indeed, I just looked through Gonzaga's season record.  While they had some good early wins, many of their preseason games were cancelled due to Covid, including a game against Baylor.  They did have a close win against West Virginia in December, where in the first half they fell behind. And West Virginia played Baylor in the the Big 12, losing a hear breaker.  The Illini lost to Baylor in a game that was close in the first half but then Baylor took control.  On this chain connection, one might infer that Gonzaga is the best team, so has the highest q.  But the Illini in early December are nowhere near as good as the Illini who just won the Big Ten Tournament.  What about a chain connection now to make a proper comparison?  Alas, there isn't one. 

Now let me turn to the brackets.  The NCAA Committee that determines each bracket and the seedings within doesn't go full seedings of all the teams in the tournament.  When there was a real pod system, particularly for the round of 64 and round of 32 games, with those sites distributed geographically around the country, it made sense for teams to play within driving distance of their home campus, if at all possible.  This would encourage fans of the team to attend the Tournament.  That is but one factor where the brackets would be jiggled to accommodate fan interest.  It also seems that the committee would encourage possible matchups that the fans seem to want but the schools are reluctant to schedule.  In the Tournament that starts this week, it is possible for Illinois to meet Loyola of Chicago in the round of 32.  That's one such example of such a fan interest game.  

A different one is in the top seeds.  The Big Ten has four teams in the top eight.  Illinois and Michigan are #1 seeds in their respective brackets.  Iowa and Ohio State are #2 in their brackets.  None of these teams are in the same bracket.  So it is possible, if incredibly unlikely, for all of them to make the Elite Eight and, if each of them wins there, for the Final Four to be an all Big Ten affair. As I said, this took some jiggling of the overall seeds.  The Big Ten already has an advantage with the location of the Tournament this year.  Indianapolis is approximately at the geographic center of the entire Big Ten.  More broadly the state of Indiana plays that role. And the Big Ten Tournament was played in the same venue where they'll host the Final Four.  Why do this other thing as well?  I can only guess that the Committee wanted to give fans something else to think about.  If all the top seeds make it through to the Sweet Sixteen, I'm sure it will get more than a mention. 

I do not bet on the games.  I think if I did it would detract from my own interest as a fan.  But it's clear that many other people do bet.  Based on the betting, Gonzaga is the overwhelming favorite.  Do those people who are betting on Gonzaga know something about what's going on that I don't?  Or are they caught up in the undefeated season narrative, which might not have in itself much to bear as to how the Tournament turns out.  I do recall back in 2005 that the Illinois team was undefeated till the last game of the regular season, where it lost to Ohio State.  As a fan, that was disheartening.  But it might very well have been a blessing in disguise, with the unbeaten streak something of a burden to maintain.  That team did make it to the NCAA Championship game.  I surely don't know how Gonzaga is handling things now.  After the Tournament is over I'd be interested in reading stories about that, but until then it's just another thing to speculate about.

That's why they play the games.  I'm chomping at the bit for the tournament to start.

Hearing The Other Side - A Pre-Proposal

I have been thinking back to the days in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before cable TV, when there were a limited number of stations we got over the air. The TV news was also more limited then, regarding time of day.  There was a half hour for national news with either Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, or Howard K. Smith. And there was a half hour of local news.  That was it.  These offerings were pretty homogeneous.  Newspapers did differ some by their political outlook.  The Daily News was more Conservative than the New York Times, yet by today's standards there was a substantial overlap in their news coverage. 

The biggest issue of the day was the Vietnam War, and it is this source to which I first associate the charge - Liberal bias in the press.  Recall Spiro Agnew's famous line - nattering nabobs of negativism.  (This piece says the line refers to other politicians, not to the press.) With hindsight being 20-20, it seems evident that those in power supporting America's involvement in Vietnam would cast aspersions against those who were against the war, so as to detract from the question whether the war itself made any sense and was une cause juste (it wasn't).  During my time in graduate school, which overlapped substantially with the Carter Presidency, I hardly watched any TV news (for the first two years I didn't have a TV) and mainly just read the New York Times.  But when I came to Illinois, near the start of the Reagan Years, it became clear that the Liberal bias in the press charge had returned, more due to the culture wars than to foreign policy, and the charge escalated until the time, first, of Conservative talk radio, particularly Rush Limbaugh, and then later, the advent of Fox News.  By then, the liberal bias charge no longer had currency, because Conservatives had their own outlets to get the news.

As a consumer of the news, for many years I was a regular viewer of the PBS NewsHour.  I watched it, in part, because it did strive to have balance in its coverage. Then, around the time that Jim Lehrer retired, I became frustrated with the show.  This coincided, more or less with the rise of the Tea Party.  To attempt balance in the show, there would always be an interview with both a Democrat and a Republican. While the person on the Democrat side was usually forthcoming, the Republican stonewalled.  That was typical.  It was usually Judy Woodruff doing the interviewing and even she seemed frustrated by it.  As a viewer, I wanted her to be more aggressive in the questioning.  But it seemed fairness prevented her from doing that.  After a while, I stopped watching and more or less gave up on TV News (the Internet had eliminated the need to watch the local News).  

I must not have been the only person in this situation, as the Aaron Sorkin vehicle, The NewsRoom, came out soon thereafter.  I don't want to comment on the show other than to note that one of the main characters, Will McAvoy, the anchor for the prime time news broadcast, was previously a prosecutor.  This seems to be the "solution" to the recalcitrant guest on the news show who wants to stonewall, but doesn't want to be embarrassed by the interviewer.  Of course, for commercial news, where the obligation for fairness in coverage may not be so strong, one can bias the selection of guests to those who are likely to be forthcoming and can be questioned without being interrogated.  

The upshot of this, I'm afraid, is that the division between News and Opinion, which newspapers still try to observe, seems to vanish on the current TV News shows.  Further, and this is getting to the reason for writing the current post, the expression of opinion as if it were news mainly is preaching to the choir.  There rarely, if ever, is contrary opinion expressed to give the viewer a fundamentally different perspective.  We've become a society where confirmation bias inhibits our ability to learn tough truths and see things they way others who disagree with us see them. 

Is there anything that can be done about that? 

* * * * * 

The following pre-proposal may be wishful thinking, but I hope you will read it through before rendering your own verdict.  The core idea is that Fox News and MSNBC do a joint venture, televised debates between their commentators (if you recall Shana Alexander and James J. Kilpatrick debating on 60 Minutes, that's in the ballpark of what's intended here) to be aired once a week at a mutually agreed time.  Why would they agree to do this?   I'm going to answer this question with another.  Is there a way to do this in such a way that the total number of viewers would rise as a consequence?

In reflecting on this second question for a while, I convinced myself that it would be pretty easy to attract those who currently watch neither Fox News nor MSNBC.  The novelty of programming of this sort should do that, at least at first.  But I had a harder time convincing myself that loyal viewers of one of these channels would watch such a debate.  I spent some time scratching my head about this and then came up with the following structure, which I hope the reader will find novel. 

Each session would be broken into three segments.  The second segment is closed mike - while one side is speaking the other side has their microphone turned off.  They take turns with this in some fixed time chunk (one minute, 90 seconds, two minutes, etc.) which needs to be determined.  The third segment is open mike and, I would hope, produces good back and forth between the participants.  In both of these segments, there are rules of decorum agreed upon, e.g., no ad hominem attacks, and there is a moderator who monitors adherence to the rules.  Violations need some form of punishment (probably in the form of shutting down the person's mike for a certain amount of time).  In any event, the second and third segments are meant to be like debates that people have watched in the past. 

It is what happens before the show and during the first segment where there is novelty to the approach.  About a week before the show one of the networks chooses the topic for that week's debate.  The other network then gets to produce a video that will be replayed in segment one of the show.  The video will be the prior perception of the highlights of the debate argument from the network that proposed the topic.  To make this concrete.  Suppose Fox News proposes the topic, they choose Tucker Carlson as their debater, while MSNBC chooses Rachel Maddow. Then the video that will be made features Rachel Maddow making the arguments that she (and her team) think Tucker Carlson will make during the debate.   If you are prepping for a debate you surely go through dress rehearsals of what the other side will argue.  This is making that dress rehearsal seemingly open to the public.  

Now, this first stage video changes the game.  It's no longer simply about the topic to be debated.  Now it's also about what one side believes the other thinks on this topic.  Does the subsequent debate show those beliefs are well grounded?  Or are there elements of delusion?  The audience now has a compelling interest to watch the show to find out which it is.  

I asked myself, could leaks of the video before the show aired be prevented? I assumed that wasn't possible, but I want to note the following.  If the other side hasn't seen the video till the show airs, then there is an added pressure on the debater.  It's not just to make the usual debating points.  It's also to show that the other side doesn't get it as to why we hold our views.  If Rachel Maddow's video is released a few days early, Tucker Carlson and his team have a better chance of finding the holes in the argument.  Knowing this, and assuming that each station wants to win the debate, which seems a reasonable assumption, there is reason to keep the video recording under wraps. 

Depending on the choice of topic and how the video is made, in any one show it may seem one station has the advantage over the other.  Fairness within a show may then be a tough nut to crack.  Fairness across shows, however, should happen by having the roles rotate from one week to the next.  

I want to note that if this works it will help Liberals understand how Conservatives think and vice versa, not just on an issue by issue basis, but on a worldview that informs consideration of the individual issues.  

The two networks could do this as an experiment, say for 3 months, with penalties for pulling out early written into the contract but with no obligation to extend the experiment beyond that.  Presumably contract renewal would indicate success, as would expansion of the format to other time slots, as well as other news organizations trying something similar. 

Encouraging Independent Reading By College Students & The Non-Course

The last few weeks I've been thinking (mainly) and creating (more recently) reading lists for college students that consist of recommendations of what they might read that are unrelated to the courses they are taking.  More about this below.  These recommendations are targeted at students in the Non-Course (also read the the next tab called No Tuition & No Course Credit, which explains why it is called the Non-Course.)  It is assumed that students in the non-course are time abundant, so they can develop a habit of regular (I would hope daily) reading of longer pieces, reading that they do slowly, in an uninterrupted and thoughtful way.  

The Non-Course itself offers a reading list that I have been compiling over the years on learning and leadership.  In my view, there's about a 90% overlap between those two.   As the life skill students need to acquire is learning to learn, this seems fitting as a kind of curriculum.  Yet, if the students aren't regular readers already, it might not be what students should start with to encourage the reading habit. The additional reading lists I produced are aimed at making some progress with that. While the Non-Course itself is meant to include my coaching of the students, since the whole purpose is for students to be in charge, they certainly could accept some of the reading recommendations but then read them entirely on their own, with no coaching whatsoever.   Those students might be interested to note that I've written about some, but not all, of the reading suggestions over the years on this Lanny on Learning blog.  So the interested student might search here to make some connection with the readings suggested on the reading lists. 

After a couple of weeks of thinking about this, where I reached the point of knowing how I wanted to cluster the readings, it occurred to me to use a restaurant menu metaphor for labeling the individual clusters. This would convey the suggested order for going through them.  

We start with Appetizers, which are short stories, and are sequenced on that page in way where I'd hope the first few most students can get through and enjoy, while the later ones might be more of a challenge.  I want to note one consideration for choosing stories that might not occur to someone who reads this post at first.  Older pieces are more apt to be freely available.  (This assumes the student does have Internet access and a device on which to do the reading, preferably not a smart phone.)  If the student is doing a kind of experiment, one that might fail, paying for the privilege would seem to block getting started.   I also had another consideration in mind, to have the readings not be connected to current events in an obvious way, because I believe those current events are a source of stress for most students, as they are for me. However, the past is connected to the present in many different ways, and even though the longer pieces listed on the page were written in other times, they do tie to the present, perhaps quite strongly.  I also want to note here that even if one embraced these criteria for selecting short stories, somebody else going through this exercise might produce quite a different list.  I'll return to that at the end of this post. 

The next course has Salads, which are essays, the non-fiction analog of short stories.  Before getting to the annotated list of essays, there is a discussion of what I take to be the critical issue.  Many college students can't make good meaning of the pieces listed on the page.  This inability to make good meaning implies that reading is an alien activity - it is not satisfying in itself.  So these students don't read much at all.  (Again, I'm not talking about text messages or micro-blogging posts.  I'm talking about longer reads.)  Without reading, the students don't get practice on reading to make good meaning.  They operate under an assumption that they should be able to discern the meaning of the piece like a snap of the fingers and don't understand the making good meaning requires some deliberation.  And lacking the practice, the students can't improve this way.  Many will conclude that they are not good readers, a la Carol Dweck's fixed mindset.  This is a vicious cycle that needs to be cut.  The Non-Course is an experiment whose goal is to do exactly that.  

The third course has full length books.  It is called Alternative Entrees, because these are not books one would read to study how people learn, nor are they likely to show up in any college course.  The main criterion used in selecting them is my having had a thrill while reading them and immediately after reading them.  An additional criterion to warrant inclusion here is an intuition that these books have something of substance to teach the reader.  So the reading should produce personal growth.  Those books in the last course may be very entertaining indeed, but lack this personal growth aspect.   That last course is labelled Desserts.  It's the sinful pleasures that we read.  To illustrate what I mean by that, the first entry is Silence of the Lambs.  In normal circumstances, dessert comes at the end of the meal.  But during the pandemic, I've been known to lead off with it and I suspect I'm not alone in that.  Likewise for the students who use these posts as guides to their own reading.  Nobody will be the wiser, unless they want to make it known. 

I'm getting closer to filling out the Non-Course Website with the posts I had planned to do.  The ones I've done so far with the readings still need to be proofread carefully.  Then I need to write at least a couple more posts, one to discuss seguing from these readings to the reading list for the Non-Course.  How can the students tell that the student is ready to make this transition?  Then there will be one final post about a potential ordering in the readings on the reading list, to get the most out of them.  After that, the Website will be set, at least for a while.  

The Non-Course now is a theoretical possibility only.  There are no students taking it at present.  I've tried some early marketing of it to former students, but got nowhere with that.  How to identify students who are taking a gap year remains a challenge to me.  University units that do admissions may track this, but why would they partner with me on this?  And I really don't want the imprimatur of a particular university on the Non-Course at this point.  I'm afraid that if I were to do this, they'd find a way to undermine the structure by somehow introducing course credit and grades.  I don't want that.  It will kill the experiment before it gets started. 

It occurred to me that a more popular instructor doing this might be able to pull off such an experiment, where I cannot.  In this case, the Website I've produced might serve as a model for what that instructor does.  Readings could be swapped out that better fit that instructor's preferences, but some of the structure might remain.  If that were to happen, I'd be very pleased.  Alternatively, a group of popular instructors might try this.  If they are still full time faculty members, some division of labor would be needed to push this forward, which makes the group approach plausible. Were that to happen, I'd like to be part of the group, if possible. 

In the meantime, it may be that readers of this post have ideas about how to recruit students to the Non-Course.  I would love to hear about those ideas.  Please post them as comments to this post or email me if you prefer.

Donald Is No Cersei

For my own amusement and edification, I've been juxtaposing current events with my recent TV watching, trying to work through possibilities that I'm otherwise not reading about in the news.  These days I mainly watch TV while exercising, mostly the treadmill and then some light weights and other light exercises to break up the routine.  I'm on my second go round of Game of Thrones, in the middle of season 5, so just past the halfway point in the series.  This season introduces us to the Sparrows, a religious cult whose call is to weed out sin and corruption in the capital city, King's Landing.  They do this with very harsh methods.  I'll elaborate some on this below. 

Now I want to turn to President Biden's aspirations, to eliminate the civil war in our country, for all citizens to think of us as one people, and to come together to achieve goodness for the whole.  Those are noble aspirations and I support them.  But my normal skepticism makes me ask, can they be achieved?  If they can be achieved, what needs to happen under the present circumstances to get us there?  Are those things happening now?

I should point out that at the time of this writing we are less than one week into the new Biden-Harris administration. Most of the Cabinet member have not yet been confirmed by the Senate.  Indeed, Merrick Garland, who was chosen to be Attorney General, and is the most interesting potential Cabinet member from the perspective of this post, is not likely to be confirmed soon as the Hearings have not yet begun for his position.  Readers should recall that President Obama nominated Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court, but then Majority Leader McConnell refused to bring his candidacy to the Senate, saying that position should be filled by the next President.  That decision rubbed many people the wrong way, including me.  It hangs over the current nomination and confirmation process.  If we do get through Merrick Garland's confirmation, it will be interesting to see how his office proceeds in moving forward the Biden objectives.

Now let's consider the main idea of this piece.  Trump clearly committed sedition in stirring up the rioters on and before January 6.  He likely committed many other crimes, while in office and during the campaign in 2016.  So far he has been held accountable for none of the prior crimes, and it is unclear how the Senate Trial for the sedition will turn out.  What is clear is that Trump had many enablers, including many Republican members of Congress, but also those in the media who promoted his lies as truth, those in the tech world who gave him a social media platform to speak to his base and to the rest of the world, and high roller donors to the Republican party, who provided the glue to keep this all together. Whether any or all of these enablers are thus themselves guilty of crimes, perhaps as accessories after the fact, perhaps in some other capacity, I will leave to others.  Instead, here I want to argue that it is necessary for the Biden objectives to be achieved that these enablers own up to what they've done and do so in a straightforward way.  Then they must atone for this and do so in a way that is acceptable to all.

Will we get there without further concerted effort or is a current day version of Sparrows needed to "encourage" the enablers to find the right path?  This piece, Why McConnell Dumped Trump, suggests that there may now be a civil war within the Republican party.  The various corporate sponsors have pulled their funding as a consequence of the denial that Biden won the election and the January 6 attempted coup.  Those who represent corporate interests are on one side of the war.  The Trumpistas are on the other side.  If the corporate side feels a need to speak honestly about the time when they refused to recognize the Biden victory and then make various amends for the damage they have wrought, that might be enough.  But Republicans in Congress have been living in a world of denial and corruption.  To expect an honest accounting now may simply be too much to ask. 

Thus, the idea of 21st century Sparrows, whose aim is to fight corruption and blatant lying in public affairs, has some appeal, at least as a fantasy, especially if they can reform the public servants so they behave decently henceforth.  I want to note here that Sparrows would not otherwise have a political agenda; their entire objective would be focused on getting rid of the lies and corruption in politics. 

In Game of Thrones, the Sparrows kidnap very important people and then imprison them in the Sept, the physical home for their religion.  While the imprisonment is harsh, the harshness is needed to cleanse the souls of those imprisoned.  It seems to work, and the persons who go through the regime are changed in a fundamental way.  They no longer focus on their own needs and instead look to benefit others.  There is one exception to this, Cersei.  I don't want to be a spoiler.  Seasons 5 and 6 of Game of Thrones are worth viewing just for this part of the story.  (It is a many threaded show and there is much other intrigue going on at the same time that I won't write about here.)  

Cersei is Machiavellian in the extreme and in that sense is similar to Donald Trump.  But, to make sense of the title of this post, she does things with planning and forethought.  Trump seems much more impulsive and tends not to think things through very well, if at all. Even a very harsh regime might not fundamentally change someone who is so Machiavellian.  It may instead create an urge for revenge.  

I started to wonder what 21st century Sparrows look like and do.  I quickly found myself out of my element, so I'm not even going to try to sketch some alternative.  Others who read this piece might be able to offer up suggestions of how it might work.  So, instead, I will close with the following observation.  During Trump's Presidency, many of those who worked for the Executive Branch resigned in disgust, and likewise many of those in Congress did not seek reelection in 2018.  These people had some insider information, but didn't have a way to use it in a way to change the course of how things were done.  There are whistleblower laws, but they aren't sufficient to get this outcome.  Perhaps a current version of Sparrows could for based on those observations.

What Learning Theory Has To Say About Current Politics

About 9  years ago I wrote a post entitled, Is reasoning taking a beating?  It describes the following example, which is about a more general issue.  What happens when a person confronts evidence that contradicts the person's prior held world view?  Many people tend to discard the evidence.

In the book, What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain teaches us that students don't know what to do when they confront evidence that contradicts their prior held world view.  Perhaps it is surprising to learn that the initial student reaction is to deny the evidence.  The world view has sanctity and deep down the student wants to preserve it.  The excellent teacher understands the tension the student is under.  With patience and persistence, the instructor nudges the student to reconsider his position.  It would be good for that position to account for the evidence that is observed.  Of course, in this case Bain is referring to an academic matter.  When looking at circular motion the students are apt to have an Aristotelian view.  A Newtonian perspective appears unnatural.  There is a getting used to period necessary to take on the new perspective.  There is leadership in helping students make the transition.

So, in physics class, it seems clear that the instructor needs to challenge students in their prior held beliefs and then nurse them through their cognitive dissonance when those beliefs run counter to the facts. How long it takes for the students to embrace a different explanation, one that is consistent with the facts, I can't say.  But I would suspect that the students may be angry with the teacher during that time interval, because the teacher is forcing them out of their comfort zone.  

Now, I won't push this much further, but I'm sure that people my age recall the criticism of liberal bias in the news, which was heard frequently prior to Fox News becoming an important force.  If people get their news exclusively from one source, and if that news has non-factual information, that surely is how the viewers form their prior world view when confronting the facts.  (It's possible that the news organization is simply mistaken, but it's also possible that the news organization deliberately obfuscates the facts.)   Who then plays the role of the patient teacher, who educates the audience to accept the facts, by changing their prior held worldview?  Conversely, it seems possible that with nobody to play the role of patient teacher, that people get so locked into their world view they then treat it as absolute truth.  

Here is one last point and then I'll close.  One role of education that is quite important, though many people tend to ignore it, is for the learner to develop a healthy skepticism about whatever new ideas come along.  The scientific method is based on such skepticism.  The skepticism allows the person to consider the evidence without seeing it as an undo threat. True Believers (a term I first heard from Eric Hoffer) don't have such skepticism.  A lot has been made as of late about non-college Whites versus Whites with college.  But I haven't seen anything said about how that distinction maps into the skepticism (or not) of the individual.  I think that connection needs to be drawn out.

My Take

I didn't sleep well last night, and I'm sure many other Americans were in the same boat.  I don't quite feel the same rage I did yesterday evening, but I've been fixated on this stuff all day today.  So I'm writing this post mainly to get it out of my system.  We'll see tomorrow whether there is any change in how I'm doing.  Another reason to write this, however, is that we're bombarded by news that by its very nature focuses on the very recent past (the last two or three days).  I think we need to look further back and connect that look to the present.  Doing that won't help at all manage the next 13 days.  But it should be useful in considering what should happen once the Biden-Harris Administration has taken over, preferably after a smooth transition.  

I want to focus on two things to give some structure to this analysis.  First, Trump seems to have a tendency to accuse the opposition of crimes that he and his cronies have actually committed.   Since the election he has been complaining that the election was stolen.  Did Trump and his cronies steal the election in 2016?  This question needs to be hammered on.  Prior to writing this piece I did two Google searches, one on truth serum, the other on polygraph tests.  Based on what I found, neither are considered very reliable.  So I won't consider them further here.  But I will speculate about Trump being imprisoned for sedition, where his guilt of that crime is as plain as day.  Once imprisoned, he needs to be interviewed, repeatedly, with those interviews recorded.   There may very well be other issues to ask about apart from whether the election in 2016 was stolen, such as how his personal debt impacted his decisions as President and why he refused to have his tax returns made public.  And, of course, a complete psychiatric profile needs to be developed.  Nevertheless, it would be good to hear what he believes happened in 2016.  

The other issue is about the various Republican Members of Congress who have ultimately recognized the election of President Elect Biden and Vice President Elect Harris, so seemingly want to absolve themselves of any earlier complicity in the misdeeds of Trump.  That will not wash.  What is needed is to make that complicity explicit and then hammer on it repeatedly.  At a minimum, these Republicans need to acknowledge what they have wrought.  After that, they should either resign from office or atone in a way that is evident to their Democratic colleagues and to Democratic voters.   By focusing on these Republicans here, I'm certainly not absolving those other Republican Members of Congress who haven't recognized the election. They have to be dealt with as well.  At the end I'll mention a few thoughts about that.  The point here is that they are on record with a list of their names available now. 

Items to consider to address these issues are:

1. The Mueller Report
1. Would a fair reading of the report warrant an impeachment of Trump on the merits, not on the politics?  Focusing on the merits, would this be a close call or a slam dunk?
   
2. The politics seemed to dictate that there would be no impeachment as long as the Republicans held a majority of the House.  And there would be no conviction, in the event of impeachment, as long as the Republicans held a majority in the Senate.
   
2. Attorney General Barr's successful effort to deep six the Mueller Report
1. Barr is but one of many Trump appointees who protected Trump from what may have seemed at the time to be a political witch hunt, only to subsequently fall out of favor with the President.
2. In hindsight, would Barr himself feel his actions with regard to the Mueller Report were warranted, or were they enabling Trump and set the stage for the recent events.
   
3. The actual Impeachment
4. The pro forma Senate Trial after the impeachment

In coming up with this list I'm following a suggestion by Masha Gessen published in the New Yorker soon after the election, Why America Needs A Reckoning With The Trump Era.  One imagines that President Biden would appoint a Trump Era Commission (I hope the name of the commission is better than that) and includes luminaries so the recommendations of the commission are taken seriously.  I would expect the chair of the commission to be Chief Justice John Roberts (who might have to recuse himself when the Senate Trial is considered), Michael Mukasey who was the last Attorney General under President George W. Bush, and Eric Holder who was the first Attorney General under President Barack Obama would be members, as would some prominent law school deans, with balance between those leaning Democrat and those leaning Republican part of the consideration concerning who was chosen.  

I also want to note that it would be an impossible standard to imagine that all Americans will accept the recommendations of such a commission, especially those in Congress who did not accept the Biden-Harris election results and those who are like minded with the people who stormed the Capitol.  But the remaining Republicans in Congress, and especially their wealthy supporters, must accept these conclusions, even if they are scathing in pointing out their negligence and tacit enabling of Trump's malfeasance.  There then is the question about what punishment should ensue after that.  Let's leave that question for a bit and turn to another that needs some answering, though I'm no lawyer so won't pretend to give a real answer here. 

Consider the possibility where the Commission concludes that, in so many words, Trump did steal the election in 2016 and committed a variety of illegal acts to do so.  That would make his entire Presidency illegitimate.  Particularly relevant for the discussion here is whether the Pardons he has recently handed out to his co-conspirators remain valid.  (There is also the issue of all those judicial appointments.  I've taken that up some in a previous post.)  If these pardons stand, then it would seem the co-conspirators would have little reason to testify in front of the Commission except to market their up and coming book (I assume most will generate income that way). If the pardons would be negated, the testifying a la plea bargaining would seem what should be expected.  Which of these would be the outcome I can't say, but it needs to be determined.  The way the Commission would proceed will depend on this.

Regarding punishment, let me say that the punishment would be for hyper partisanship leading to negligence, thereby enabling President Trump's malfeasance.  In my mind, Senator McConnell as the Majority Leader should be forced to resign, but that needs real pressure behind the scene to achieve that outcome.  In an earlier post, Tough Love for Republican Enablers of Trump Who Will Still Be Serving in Government in 2021, I wrote the following:

I'm sure the reader wants to know what sort of actual punishment will serve as this tough love.  I want to know too.  The ideal punishment would achieve the goals but then not be recklessly used by future generations, when there is no need for it.  I'm not fully conversant with the powers the Commander in Chief can wield, but this much I would be willing to offer.  Suppose the then President Biden aggressively exercises some power and perhaps abuses power to a certain extent.  (Following Trump would seem to give some license to doing that.)  Congress would then want to curb that power and Biden would agree to legislation that does that.  Passing the legislation would reign in future abuses, one would hope.  Until the legislation is passed, the power would be used quite aggressively. 

By means of illustration, suppose the President asserts that for National Security reasons, Senator X must be detained indefinitely and while in detention the Senator will be incommunicado, even with family. Likewise, this will happen for Representative Y, Federal Judge Z, and even one of the Supreme Court Justices appointed under Trump.  President Biden will say that others who might potentially receive such punishment can avoid it either by resigning or, in the case of elected officials, by stopping the obstruction and playing the game as it should be played. Then, let this sink in for a while, become the new normal for a certain amount of time, and let the frustration on the Republican side build, while the cooperative behavior in Congress also increases. 

Now imagine that the first to be detained are those Senators who did not recognize the Biden-Harris election and the next on the list are some of the Representatives who did likewise.  Biden doing this might truly scare Republican Members of Congress.  He is everyone's Uncle Joe, and this would be a very mean thing to do. Yet it would be a perfect getting even activity, and since his predecessor abused his office, it opens a window for Biden to do likewise.  This can be accompanied with something that sounds more official, a Censure, but the reality is that the Censure is of symbolic importance only. There is no other punishment that comes with Censure.

It seems to me that ultimately the hyper partisanship can end only if the big Republican funders reach the conclusion that it encourages things to get out of hand.  To them, Trump was a disaster.  Yet now there is a competition of sorts among certain Members of Congress to become the next Trump clone.  These high rollers need to lessen their expectations on their traditional objectives - less taxation and less regulation - to move us off this path to fascism, which is where this seems to be going now.  To prevent that, it might not be so bad for the Democrats to be in control for a while.  We're not out of the woods yet, for sure.  But, at least, there does seem to be a path where we can return to something that seems normal.

Freedom of Blather

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

I have been slowly reading through the pieces David Brooks recommends in his latest Sidney Awards piece.  He begins with this interview, How To Tell If You're Being Canceled.  To motivate that selection, Brooks precedes it with a discussion of the experience of James Flynn.  He wrote a book that defended free speech.  The book was pulled by his publisher.  I am going to take on these pieces in my post.  

As a basis for my critique, I'll make reference to a post from a few years ago, The Demagoguery of the Reasonable Conservative Commentator, which does a rather thorough deconstruction of a column by Bret Stephens. In that post, I refer to Stephens' column as a hatchet job and that is mainly from what he omits in his argument that I thought essential to include.  I often have this feeling of reading a hatchet job when I do read pieces by Conservative authors (which I do with less frequency as of late).  So, here I will put in the missing pieces.

First, let me consider self-publishing such as in this blog post.  It is an option available to anyone with an Internet connection.  The host will have some terms of service that must be abided by, but otherwise, the author can say whatever he wants - complete freedom.  This freedom doesn't imply there will be any readers.  But the message can certainly get out.  For somebody like me who has been at it for some time, perhaps the quality of past posts provides some indicator of the quality of the current post.  But maybe not.  The term blather, as I'm using it in my title, is meant to be writing or speech that has no mechanism of quality assurance to accompany it.  Freedom of blather is a condition of the world we live in.  (For those in a university setting where there are codes of conduct, which may even govern blather on platforms not associated with the university, one can post under an alias and bypass the regulation that way.)

Is blather, as I've described it in the previous paragraph, sufficient when considering speech?  If it is, then all of this is much ado about nothing.  Stop complaining.  Freedom of speech is alive and well. 

Second, let us consider the examples that were presented in these pieces.  The examples feature some organization with a strong reputation itself, the New York Times is one, Middlebury College is another, giving its imprimatur to a piece of writing by publishing it or likewise giving its imprimatur by inviting the person to give a campus lecture.  The imprimatur is an implicit statement about quality assurance.  In each case that implicit statement is made to the organization's constituency.  For the New York Times, that is readers.  For Middlebury College, that is students, faculty and staff, and alumni.  

In both cases, it seems that there is an obligation by the organization to provide the constituency with well argued ideas that the constituency would tend to resist.  If most readers of the New York Times are Liberal, these would be pieces written by Conservative authors and likewise for students at Middlebury.  In doing this, the role is something akin to a parent making their kids eat their vegetables at dinner.  It's good for them, even if they don't like the taste.  Does paternalism of this sort survive, even when the constituency is itself comprised of adults?  (I will leave the question of whether college students are children or adults unanswered here.) The quote that I began this piece with provides a basis for arguing that the type of adults we aspire for in these constituencies should be able to handle the variety without undo difficulty.

In the economics analysis of quality assurance of this sort, as described in Klein and Leffler's article, The Role of Market Forces in Assuring Contractual Performance, it is the repeat purchases of customers that provides incentive for a firm to produce high quality of an experience good (a good where the customer can't tell the quality at the time of purchase) even when there is a one-shot gain for the firm from producing low quality, because doing that is cheaper.  In that event we say the firm "cashes in" on its reputation.  Then the customers will "punish" the firm by shopping elsewhere in the future.  Likewise, what Jonathan Rauch refers to as the Cancel Culture, can be thought of as institutions not honoring their trust relationship with their constituencies and then being punished for that. 

So, what I find missing in the Rauch interview, and I suspect it is missing as well in Flynn's book, it is certainly missing in the Webpage that Brooks linked to, is a look at what the implicit promise is between such a high profile organization and its constituency and what would constitute a breach of this promise.  Not everyone has an Op-Ed in the New York Times and not everyone gets to give a public lecture at Middlebury.  So there surely are criteria for ruling people out as speakers or ruling their written work out for publication.  Were those criteria applied well in the cases cited or not?  Rauch bypasses this entirely:

The notion here is that emotional injury is a kind of harm like physical injury, and because it's a kind of harm it's a rights violation. The problem is this is a completely subjective standard, and it makes any form of criticism potentially subject to censorship and cancellation and lumps science into a human rights violation.

Having dismissed emotional injury, it appears the organizations are never in a position to violate the trust.   The blame can then fall only on those doing the canceling.   In my view, that is a poor analysis of the situation.

Let me make specific comments about the cases cited.  Students at Middlebury could very well learn about the ideas of Charles Murray by reading The Bell Curve or by watching one of the many videos of him on YouTube.  It is a fatuous argument to say he has to be invited to campus for students to hear that view.  In the case of the New York Times publishing the Op-Ed by Tom Cotton, a quite different argument can be made for not doing it, which does not deal with emotional injury.  The Times, like it or not, is part of the political landscape.  When a well known Conservative political figure publishes a piece in the Times, it lends legitimacy to the argument being made.  We are living in a wackadoodle world now where Trump does crazy things that should be strongly resisted.  Publishing Cotton's piece was a mild form of embrace of the Trump view.  I would hope that in the future we can return to where this sort of consideration is not relevant.  But it would be naive to think it is not relevant now. 

Third, the interview with Rauch makes no mention of sexual harassment nor of misogynistic speech.  I can't tell whether the interviewer, Nick Gillespie, deliberately steered the discussion away from that example or not.  Had it been included, there would be a clearer linkage between the emotional harm and the physical harm.  There is no doubt #MeToo is a form of the Cancel Culture.  But if you interviewed women, many would say that it has had a material impact on reducing sexual harassment.   Including this, as example, would weaken Rauch's argument.  It's lack of inclusion is bothersome, for that reason. 

Let me close by noting that over the years I've written a handful of posts that focus on freedom of speech.  In case the current post stimulates thinking in the reader, its status as blather notwithstanding, the reader might find some of these others interesting as well. 

• There really isn't freedom of speech in a well functioning classroom
• What Does Free Speech Mean? Some Issues to Consider
• Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech - My Take
  

What Small Non-Profit Organizations Want From Santa

A few days ago a friend from junior high and high school posted a link to this piece about the charitable giving of MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos. She is an incredibly wealthy woman.  Her charitable giving is unlike yours and mine, even if you are quite generous in this regard.  Our giving is a drop in the bucket, one that we hope fills up with the collective giving of others.  Her giving matters in itself.  It is perhaps 5 orders of magnitude greater than what we give.  The piece, as I read it, was meant at least in part as a critique about how most foundations give out their money, particularly that Scott doesn't require grant proposals and she gives out large amounts with no restrictions on how the money is spent.  The recipients are identified with verifiable information about prior performance. (More on that idea below.)  These are organizations that have proven themselves trustworthy. 

Linked within that piece is an essay that MacKenzie Scott wrote, which describes the giving and provides a list of the recipient organizations that have received funds this year.  In this post I'm going to offer a critique of that post.  Before I do, however, I want to note that it is her money she is giving away.  She can do with it what she'd like, with the proviso that for tax purposes the recipients must have the right status to receive charitable donations as given by the IRS.  So my critique can be thought of as imagining a hypothetical where the funds were public monies instead, or a different hypothetical where I'm offering consulting advice to MacKenzie Scott that she doesn't seem to be getting yet from her team of advisers, for how she might modify the giving in the future.  

For those who don't already know me, I'm retired now but was an academic economist for about half my career at the University of Illinois.  I made a switch in the mid 1990s to educational technology and was a high level administrator on campus in that area until I retired.  I stopped publishing in economics journals at around the time of the career switch, but I continue to write on economics and sometimes on economics and higher education, such as this recent very long blog post.  (It is not peer reviewed.  It reads as something of a combination between an opinion piece and an economic analysis, with its own hypothetical to consider.)  Also, when I led the SCALE project on campus, from summer 1996 to summer 2000, I ran an internal grant program to support novel ed tech projects and I was also able to make "officer grants" that were smaller but could be given without the approval of our review committee.  This is clearly not the same thing as what MacKenzie Scott is doing, but it does suggest I have some experience that may be relevant in considering the perspective of the donor.

Let me make one other caveat before beginning, by focusing on the various food banks that are on MacKenzie Scott's list.  Recently I've been making donations to a food bank in my area, which did not make the list.  Indeed, I searched the list for organizations from Illinois.  There were 5 of them, but no food banks.  I then searched Google Maps for food banks in Illinois.  There are a multitude of them and it seems by their names that there are several different providers.  I began to ask myself the question, should this sort of service be provided by a charity or should it instead be provided by government?  Is there a way that economic theory can answer this question or is it simply a matter of individual preference?  Let me note that the University of Illinois, considered a public university, gets its funding from a variety of sources.  When I started here back in 1980, the bulk of the funding came out of State of Illinois tax dollars.  That is no longer true.  So one might want to consider the historical record on food banks and their equivalent.  I have a vague notion (one I haven't tracked down) that soup kitchens during the Great Depression were funded, at least in part, by the New Deal.  And the War on Poverty from when LBJ was President, amplified on these sorts of services - via Food Stamps, for example.  Then, since Reagan, much of this was undone.  So one might argue that Liberals have one answer to this question while Conservative/Libertarians have a different answer.  On the supply of funds for such services, maybe that is far as we can get. 

But there is a different argument for the Liberal side that the social safety net is needed in a just society a la Rawls, and should be considered a public good.  Public goods should be provided by government.  In the absence of government provision, private charities can take up some of the slack.  But they may end up excluding a good segment of the population.  There is also a supply side argument which, frankly, I don't know enough about to argue except by waving my hands.  This is in regard to the geographic distribution of the food banks and their respective supply chains.  Is that, perhaps, inefficient because of wasteful duplication?  I want to observe there are two such food banks in the Champaign-Urbana area, which is what suggested the question to me.  After all, we are a college town, not a major urban area.  But maybe we are a large enough MSA to warrant two food banks.  (Wikipedia lists us as ranked 202 in the U.S.)  In any event, if MacKenzie Scott will be funding food banks in the future, some of those not yet on the list and perhaps repeat funding for some that already are on the list, then it behooves us to understand not just the good function of an individual food bank, but function of the entire system.  Could things be made more efficient?  Could hungry people who find access to be difficult at present be granted access by some other approach?   These questions deserve an answer from looking at the system as a whole. 

Now let me turn to my critique.  I will begin with a brief mention of some small non-profits I'm aware of, either because I've made donations to them at the urging of a friend, or because I've had some other interaction with them.

• Montgomery's Kids - helping kids who live in foster homes in Montgomery County, Maryland.
• Imerman Angels - helping those with cancer via personal connections to others who have been through the experience. 
• Fit to Recover - helping former addicts lead a healthy lifestyle through exercise.
• Spirit In Action - A micro-grant organization that makes some of its grants internationally.
• Universal Love Alliance Foundation - A U.S. charity that takes donations and funnels them to Universal Love Alliance, a human rights organization that focuses on the rights of marginalized people in Uganda.  (I work for both ULAF and ULA and will elaborate about that some below.)
• BlaqOut - An organization to support and advocate for Gay Black males. 

To complete the picture here, the first three on the list I know through friends.  Universal Love Alliance has received several grants from Spirit In Action.  BlaqOut provided funding for ULA to do a session about HIV prevention, testing, and treatment held at the ULA office.  Also, none of the organizations listed above made MacKenzie's Scott list.  Do they have even an epsilon probability of getting funded by her in the future? Or is that completely out of the question?  Finally, I want to note that I tried to list the organizations by "edginess," perhaps not a well defined concept though I hope the reader gets the point.  Would edginess matter in whether an organization receives funding or not?

There are two criteria that I want to challenge.  One is how MacKenzie Scott is managing risk, trying to make sure that each grant has a high chance of success.  For someone with limited funding, this may be right.  But Scott isn't in this situation.  If there is some positive correlation between risk and return, then minimizing risk does not produce the socially optimal solution.   Consider this piece from more than a decade ago about cancer research during the previous 40 years.  It argues that while progress has been made, the big breakthrough we've been hoping for has eluded us, because individual researchers have been too risk averse in their approach.  But taking on  risks means failure is more likely and in the presence of failure there are apt to be Monday morning quarterbacks who challenge the entire approach.  In order to take on such risk, the funders must be secure from such external pressure.  Turning away from cancer research and to organizations that MacKenzie Scott might support, edgy organizations that pioneer new ways of doing things and do so at small scale in some particular locale might produce a replicable model in the event they succeed.  In this case the benefit would be far beyond the benefit created in their locale.  This sort of thing should be encouraged, even if there are substantial risks at the get go. 

The other criterion I want to consider is focusing exclusively on American organizations whose beneficiaries are also in the U.S. or Puerto Rico.  Why not fund internationally, and particularly to organizations in Third-World countries, perhaps through U.S. based organizations that already do that, like Spirit In Action (or ULAF)?  Is this too a matter of managing risk?  Or is there some other consideration?

Having been involved with some scams in my ULA/ULAF work, I will concede that risk is there and perhaps is larger than with domestic non-profit organizations.  But the need is enormous.  Further there are large social/political factors that matter.  Taking Uganda as but one example, it is worthwhile to watch the documentary, God Loves Uganda, which provides depth on American Evangelical Christians coming to Uganda, largely to spread homophobia.  This needs a credible counter force.  Where will that come from?  Further the U.S. Department of Defense has given military aid to many African countries, Uganda included.  The funds are diverted from their intended purpose by President Musuveni and then used to quash the political opposition.  So, even if one's concerns are purely humanitarian, there is a need to show presence in Uganda; so that ordinary people there can have realistic hope of a better future. 

Now I want to turn to the human rights work that ULA does.  In 2018 ULA received a grant from the U.S. Embassy in Kampala to do workshops for religious leaders, teaching them about tolerance and acceptance of LGBTI people.  While this might seem a strange thing from a U.S. perspective, Uganda is a very religious country and these religious leaders have important positions in their respective communities, as they guide the views and beliefs of other community members.  The workshops were transformational and highly regarded by the Embassy members who sponsored the grant, some of whom attended for a day or two.  Near to the end of the first workshop, video interviews were done with some of the participants; each interview has just one participant, who described what was learned.  These videos are compelling to watch and speak to the strong impact of the workshop.  Unfortunately, they can't be publicly shared.  Doing so might put those who attended the workshop in danger.  So we have credible information about workshop effectiveness, but we can't broadcast it.  The best we can do is to rely on word of mouth, via the endorsement of sponsors.  And, I'm not sure why this is, but Embassy personnel seem to turnover fairly frequently, as these people are assigned to other U.S. Embassies elsewhere around the globe.   Based on this experience, my expectation is that others who do edgy type of work often can't share information about the effectiveness of the work, for similar reasons.  This makes it harder to get future funding.  Maybe the funders, such as MacKenzie Scott, should go looking for such projects, to counter these difficulties.  Or they should go looking for organizations like Spirit In Action, which through their own funding have identified useful projects and organizations that would otherwise defy identification.  

I want to make one other observation.  I am the ghostwriter for ULA.  I help them with grant proposals, training documents, and correspondence.  I described what I do at some length in this blog post.  The question for MacKenzie Scott is this:  Can the ghostwriting function be replicated, performed by others and incorporated by different organizations? I'm going to guess at the answer here.  It is not immediately replicable, but we can learn how to replicate it, so the service is provided by others and made available to organizations that have neither the skill nor the resources to devote to writing grants themselves.  One impediment that surely must be overcome happens when the ghostwriter has substantially more formal education than the leaders of the organization that employ the ghostwriter, which seems likely to me.  The ghostwriter must be a partner along with those leaders, but the ghostwriter can't act as a boss without the relationship breaking down. 

If that guess is right, then MacKenzie Scott could fund a variety of pilots that would be aimed at replication.  If some of those pilots are promising, the next step would be to scale up the approach, then "make a market" between the ghostwriters and organizations they support, by covering the full cost of the activity and developing a matching process that is effective.  Viewed in its entirety, this would be a kind of hedge.  It may be that other large foundations abandon their grant funding approach and embrace, instead, the approach MacKenzie Scott has already taken.  But if there is a lot of inertia, the old ways will stick.  The hedge then would accommodate that and yet make many organizations credible for grants from these foundations where in the past these organizations wouldn't have bothered to apply. 

Let me close.  As the Treasurer for ULAF, I dream for a very generous donor, or a small number of regular donors who make substantial contributions.  Now it's a constant struggle to assure adequate funding for ULA to operate, especially given all the uncertainty in Uganda at present.   On the other hand, I don't expect Santa to fulfill this wish soon.  But I hope he can leave a note - keep at it, good things come to those who wait.

Doing What Is Right - Following An Ethical Code Or Figuring It Out By Situational Analysis?

I accidentally deleted this post.  I found the editor version and it is republished below.  But the url of the post is different now.  Sorry about that.

-----

Fiction, whether a short story or a novel, a movie and a TV show as well, offers entertainment, certainly, but also gives the author's point of view, sometimes on issues where the characters must make ethical choices.  This author point of view stands in contrast to the point of view of the reader, who may not have thought about the underlying issues at all, or considered them only from a substantially different perspective.  We readers thus get a bonus from having a go at a work of fiction.  We get pleasure from the story, but we also get moral instruction of a kind that might actually reach us, as long as we embrace the story and consider it in reflection as well as reading it the first time through. 

As I've been a John le Carré fan for quite some time, typically reading one of his novels during the winter holidays, I can report that I was first drawn to them purely for the entertainment, but in the more recent ones I've read the ethical components were more evident to me.  Perhaps I've reached the age where I'm ready for these ethical lessons, or especially want something of this sort as a contrast to the tenor of our time, a way to keep a bit of idealism alive inside me when it is so easy to become completely jaded.  Given le Carré's recent passing, in the next day or two I do plan to read one of his older books for a second time, one that has gathered dust on my bookshelf.  And I do want to note that the ethical education in the stories is not about purity in behavior, but rather a way to navigate turbulence of actual life.

“Thematically, le Carré’s true subject is not spying,” Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The New Yorker in 1999. “It is the endlessly deceptive maze of human relations: the betrayal that is a kind of love, the lie that is a sort of truth, good men serving bad causes and bad men serving good.”

However, rather than use le Carré as my focus for discussing the question in the title of this post, I'm going to rely instead on Game of Thrones, which I've been watching recently as I do the treadmill in our basement.  Indeed, I've learned to turn on captions while doing this so the noise of the treadmill doesn't block the message that I should be hearing.  I recently finished going through all 8 seasons and am now going through the episodes again, to make further identification with the characters and the story line.  I actually want to focus only on one little bit of the plot.  Jon Snow's true identity is revealed near the end of season 7.  When Jon learns this he feels obligated to tell others, first Daenerys, then his "sisters," Sansa and Arya.  Daenerys pleads with Jon not to tell them, but he does what he feels he must.  He swears them to secrecy.  Yet Sansa doesn't keep the secret and that leads to many adverse consequences. This makes much of season 8 a tragedy.  So, one wonders, could the tragedy have been avoided if Jon exercised discretion rather feeling bound by some code?  

Before trying to answer this question, I'd like to make several asides.  First, I've been noodling on this post for several weeks, but not fully satisfied with what I had come up with.  I did come to an overall conclusion, which was based in part by my son Nathan, who had read all the books by George R.R. Martin, telling me that seasons 7 and 8 of Game of Thrones went beyond the books.   David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who wrote the screenplays for TV series based on the books in the first six seasons, were the authors of that part of the story.  The conclusion is that they should be encouraged to write a few different versions of the end of season 7 and season 8, keeping the war with Ice King intact, but varying the story by whether Jon Snow ever learns his true identity or, if he does, whether he keeps it secret. I'm guessing there would be quite an audience for these alternative endings, even if they never were made into a TV show.  

Second, in the middle of the noodling it occurred to me that some of my old economics research is actually somewhat relevant to the question in the title. Thirty years ago I wrote a paper called Flexibility Versus Commitment in Strategic Trade Policy Under Uncertainty: A Model of Endogenous Policy Leadership.  (The Working Paper is dated April 1990 while the published version appeared in the Journal of International Economics the following year.)  Indeed, in the second quarter of my first year of graduate school, we learned about the debate in macroeconomics between those who favored rules for fiscal and monetary policy (Monetarists) and those who favored discretion (Keynesians).  So in other contexts, where the concern is not fundamentally ethical, though you could take economic performance as a kind of ethical imperative, I've been exposed to this type of question for quite a long time and find myself engaged with it.  I'm not sure whether others who watched Game of Thrones would be likewise engaged, but perhaps they would.  

Third, this bit about Jon Snow's true identity exposes a variety of potential inconsistencies in the story.  I'll mention only a couple here.  There may be others.  Daenerys views Jon Snow's true identity as giving him more of a legitimate claim to the Iron Throne than she has, because he is a male heir in the Targaryen bloodline and the society is quite sexist that way.  Yet Ned Stark doesn't consider Jon Snow as a possible successor to Robert Baratheon at all.  Indeed, in retrospect it seems Jon was sent to join the Night's Watch so the question would never come up.  But shouldn't Ned Stark have seen Jon as the rightful successor rather than Stannis Baratheon?  The other inconsistency is that Catelyn Stark never questioned the story that Jon Snow was Ned's bastard son.  But Ned was otherwise such a good and upstanding person.  Did he whore around nonetheless?  And Ned's sister is Jon's true mother.  Catelyn must have known approximately when she died, though she wouldn't have known that she died from complications in childbirth.  But might Catelyn have put two and two together, given what she did know?  For the story to work as it was told, it required that Catelyn, for whatever reason, didn't do this. 

The last aside comes from a lesson I learned the last time I taught a class for the Campus Honors Program, back in fall 2009.  The CHP students are among the best we have on campus.  Yet they asked me pointedly, more than once, to be very direct with my instructions and to avoid subtlety.  I gathered from this experience that they felt they weren't very good at reading between the lines and/or they had been badly burned from having made what they considered a minor mistake of this sort.  This point actually manifests in Game of Thrones repeatedly.  Once he became the King's Hand, Ned Stark is terrible at playing the game of palace intrigue.  He doesn't understand fully what is going on and he doesn't seem to care to devote his attention and energy to figuring this out.   The characters who are good at this game in the first season - Cersei, Lord Varys, Littlefinger, and Tyrion, are each ethically challenged, though some more than others. The story makes it seem that one truly understands what's going on only if one wants to practice deception.   I don't think that is true, but in the world created in Game of Thrones, the ones who practice deception surely need to have a good understanding of what's actually happening. 

Now I want to briefly sketch how a "what if analysis" might be done by the character of Jon Snow on whether to tell others about his true identity.  First, one might imagine playing out the story as if Bran never learned about Jon's identity nor conferred with Samwell that it was a birth done in wedlock, so Jon wasn't a bastard.  Without this as part of the plot line, the story still holds interest because of the evident rivalry between Sansa and Daenerys.  Would Jon have been able to resolve this in a way that was tolerable, if not amicable?  

Here is an interesting wrinkle that some viewers might have liked to see.  Sansa became good at the palace intrigue game by carefully observing others who were good at the game and, of course, by being the victim of many of those decisions without having the power to undo them herself.  This provided the strong motivation for her learning.  Jon recognized this in Sansa early on after his return to Winterfell. Could he have Sansa design an arrangement that Dany would accept which would also work for her. In this arrangement Jon would somehow be released from his being King of the North or be allowed to hold that title in absentia, while Jon would be living with Dany in King's Landing.  Sansa would be the Lady of Winterfell and the surrogate King of the North (or some other title to that effect).  The bending of the knew part might be moot because of the great distance between Winterfell and King's Landing. One would think a peace along these lines would be possible.

There is a different issue in this scenario that would have to be confronted.  Daenerys' downfall was an example of power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely.  In this case, substitute feeling betrayed for corrupting.  Of course, everyone was betrayed by Cersei, who didn't send her troops to fight the Ice King. That sense of betrayal was still there.  But Daenerys' sense of betrayal was so much stronger in the version that aired, because after Jon Snow's secret was made known to certain characters, they betrayed Daenerys, Lord Varys, certainly, Tyrion for telling Lord Varys, and Jon Snow too, both for telling Sansa though Dany had requested not too, and for no longer loving her physically, as it became apparent that Dany was Jon's aunt and intimate relations between close relatives was unseemly.  With all this betrayal, Daenerys felt a rage that couldn't be contained and blocked her good judgement.  It made her a fierce opponent in fighting the war against Cersei's forces, but it made her unsuitable to rule. If, instead, none of the other betrayals had occurred, would Daenerys then have been able to thread the needle, having enough rage to still win the war but then, with that accomplished, being able to pull back and show compassion for the vanquished as long as they would lay down their swords.  Two possible story lines emerge depending on whether the needle gets threaded or not.

In the next scenario, Jon does learn about his identity, but he decides to sit on this information rather than tell those people he felt obligated to tell in the show as it aired.  This would keep the secret, as Bran and Samwell wouldn't tell anyone else.  In some ways, it would play out the same as in the case where there was no secret to reveal. The big issue in this case is Dany being Jon's aunt, and how he would deal with that fact.  Two alternatives are first, that once Jon verified Dany couldn't bear children, her being his aunt pretty much becomes immaterial, as inbreeding wouldn't happen. The other is that the possibility of a child can't be ruled out, so Jon figures out a way where he wouldn't sleep with Dany thereafter.  As King in the North, he would return to Winterfell after the war while Dany would stay at King's Landing.  Could this be pulled off so that he avoided situations to sleep with Dany both before before the big battle and after?  Again there are two possible story lines.  In the one where it doesn't work out well, Dany starts to question whether Jon loves her, but she won't have a good reason for why he doesn't. This could lead to a personal tragedy for them, without it leading to the large tragedy for all the resident of King's Landing.

That last scenario I'll consider here is where Jon obeys Dany's wish and tells nobody else but her.  They then would have it out about the aunt thing.  (It is odd to me that it was never discussed between them and it didn't seem to bother Dany at all.) Somehow they work through a mutual understanding, even if that is laden with tears and emotional pain.  

I do have this feeling that the bending of the knee, as a symbol, could be modified if Jon was at Dany's side.  She could be more generous then and treat those in leadership of the other kingdoms as partners rather than as subordinates. The show was long on tragic outcomes, which for pure entertainment might be right.  But as an approach to good management, the purely traditional approach was lacking.  Further, the external threats to the seven kingdoms seemed to have been eradicated, at least for the time being.  Once the war with Cersei was won, this appeared to be a time where all should get along.  If that was obvious to the viewers, why wasn't it obvious to the characters in the show.