He sleeps in on Easter morning
You know your kid's a teenager when …
He sleeps in on Easter morning
A missing gadget ?
Brothers and sisters I have none, but that man’s father is my father’s son
Most people can solve this familiar puzzle if they think about it for a little while, but only slightly more complex versions have them floundering. Yet the problem described isn’t much more difficult than naming the day after the day after yesterday, which (I think) most people can do instantly. The fact that such a simple problem can be posed as a puzzle is just one piece of evidence that people (at least people in modern/Western societies) have trouble learning about and reasoning about kinship relations.
I’m generally sympathetic to the Cosmides-Tooby idea of the mind as a collection of special-purpose gadgets rather than a general-purpose computer. The work of Kahneman and Tversky on probability judgements (also my own main area of theoretical research) supports this idea. And I’ve occasionally put forward evolutionary arguments to support the view that people are likely to overweight low-probability extreme events.
So, there is a bigger puzzle here for me. Assuming that the set of gadgets with which our minds are now equipped is the product of evolution, shouldn’t we (at least in some phase of our lives) be as good at learning about kinship systems as young children are at learning about languages? After all, it’s hard to imagine that we can be acting to promote the survival of our genes if we don’t know who is carrying them.
It’s often asserted that modern/Western society has a particularly minimal kinship system and that the systems prevailing in other societies are considerably more complex. This certainly seems to be true of the Aboriginal Australian systems I’ve seen described, but I don’t know whether it’s true more generally. Has the kinship instinct atrophied over time, and, if so, what are the implications?
The good news
For Good Friday, I thought I’d focus on some good news.
First, the Indonesian parliamentary election is nearly all good news. It’s good news that the election was held at all, and was pretty much free and fair. It’s even more good news that the military no longer holds a block of seats as it did under Suharto. And, generally speaking the results have been encouraging. Militant Islamists did poorly and the success of the Democrat party provides a plausible alternative presidential candidate, Yudhoyono. The unappealing prospect that Wiranto would make a comeback as president seems to be receding.
The earlier elections in Malaysia were also reasonably encouraging is showing little support for radical Islamism. But here, as in Singapore, the system can’t really be called democratic until it has managed a change of government. Surprisingly, Indonesia seems to have surpassed its neighbours in this respect. Given the dire state of affairs a few years ago, with Christian and Islamist militias fighting it out, the military fomenting trouble and Suharto still in the wings, this is an impressive achievement.
Threaded comments
I’m considering adding a threaded comments feature to the site. You can see how it works, here. I’m in two minds about it. I don’t at all like the usual threaded comments systems where you have to open each comment individually, but this doesn’t seem to suffer from that problem. But it might be overkill for the discussions we have here. Any thoughts?
The Sistani option
I’m going to try hard from now on to avoid debating whether the war with Iraq was a mistake, and to focus on the question of what should be done from here onwards.
I’ve argued for some months that the most plausible option for a stable allocation of power in Iraq is a de facto two-state solution in which the Kurds get effective autonomy and a share of the oil and the rest of Iraq gets a government which will be dominated by the Shiites. With luck, they won’t try and settle too many scores and will recognise the need to keep much of the Sunni professional elite on side. The government would be Islamist, but not a direct theocracy like Iran.
The key to all this, almost certainly, is Ayatollah Sistani. He’s not the person I’d want running my country (or more precisely acting as the eminence grise for its day-to-day rulers), but he seems like the only plausible choice who wouldn’t be an absolute disaster.
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Doing my bit to clean up the blogosphere
I’m reposting this piece by Chris Bertram over at Crooked Timber
It seems that the top-ranked site on Google if you search for “Jew” is an anti-semitic site. So this is CT doing our googlebombing best to correct this by linking to the Wikipedia entry for Jew instead. (See Norman Geras for more details).
The back of the envelope model of the FTA
Following up on the snippet below, I’ve done an estimates of the impact of the proposed Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the US, as it affects merchandise trade. My bottom line is that Australia loses about $1 billion per year, of which $800 million is a net transfer of tariff revenue to the US and $200 million is the deadweight cost of replacing the lost tariff revenue, net of reductions in the domestic deadweight cost of tariffs.
This estimate may be contrasted with the most optimistic one publicised before the FTA was signed, a benefit of $4 billion over 10 years or $400 million per year, IIRC.
I’d like to thank everyone who’s contributed to the debate so far, notably Harry Clark, Uncle Milton, John Humphreys and PM Lawrence. The discussion has helped me to sharpen up my own thoughts. Obviously what I’ve done is very preliminary, and I’d welcome more comments.
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Conspiracy or stuffup ?
Perhaps the best informed commentator on the Shiite community in Iraq, Juan Cole asks whether the actions of the Coalition Administration which led directly to the current bloody fighting between Coalition forces and (hitherto relatively quiescent) Shiite militias was Incompetence or Double-Dealing . As he says
The Coalition decision to provoke a fight with Muqtada al-Sadr’s movement[1] only three months before the Coalition Provisional Authority goes out of business has to be seen as a form of gross incompetence in governance. How did the CPA get to the point where it has turned even Iraqi Shiites, who were initially grateful for the removal of Saddam Hussein, against the United States? Where it risks fighting dual Sunni Arab and Shiite insurgencies simultaneously, at a time when US troops are rotating on a massive scale and hoping to downsize their forces in country? At a time when the Spanish, Thai and other contingents are already committed to leaving, and the UN is reluctant to get involved?
As I read Cole, the answer is neither pure incompetence nor double-dealing for its own sake but the fact that the US Administration contains so many competing agendas that its policies are invariably incoherent.
fn1. By closing their newspaper, arresting a leading supporter of Sadr and threatening Sadr himself.
Monday Message Board
Another Monday, another Message Board! Feel free to post comments any topic (as always, civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). My suggested discussion starter – What does Easter mean to you?
