Right Reason

Our Lawless Police

 

 

 

Yesterday, Officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of all charges, including second-degree manslaughter, in the shooting of Philando Castile. Mark Berman of The Washington Post reports:

The Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile during a traffic stop was acquitted on all charges by a jury Friday, a decision that came nearly a year after the encounter was partially streamed online to a rapt nation in the midst of a painful reckoning over shootings by law enforcement.

Officer Jeronimo Yanez pulled Castile’s car over in Falcon Heights, a suburb near Minneapolis and St. Paul, and the officer later said he thought Castile matched the description of a suspect in a robbery. The stop quickly escalated.

Yanez fired into the car, saying later he thought Castile was going for his gun, a claim Castile’s girlfriend, sitting in the seat next to him, disputed. She began streaming the aftermath of the shooting on Facebook Live.
…
During the trial, jurors heard testimony from dozens of witnesses, including Yanez, who cried on the stand while saying he did not want to shoot Castile. Yanez testified that he thought his life was in danger at the time, and attorneys for Yanez have argued that Castile caused his own death because of his actions during the traffic stop.
…
Yanez approached the car window and asked Castile for his license and proof of insurance, which the driver handed over, the complaint states. Castile also told Yanez he had a firearm on him, and seconds later, the officer told the driver not to pull out the gun. Castile said he was not taking out the gun, which Reynolds echoed. Yanez screamed, “Don’t pull it out” and pulled his own gun out, firing seven shots at Castile, the complaint states.
…

When Yanez spoke to state investigators a day after the shooting, he told them he was “in fear for my life and my partner’s life.” Yanez told them that he thought Castile was reaching for the gun.

“I thought I was gonna die,” he told investigators, according to the complaint.

Given the salient role that Mr. Yanez’s fear has played in the trial, it is important to keep in mind the words of Ramsey County Attorney John Choi when he decided to charge Mr. Yanez 

When evaluating the reasonableness of a police officer's use of deadly force, we must take into account that police officers are often required to react quickly—in tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving situations. To justify the use of deadly force, it is not enough, however, for the police officer to merely express a subjective fear of death or great bodily harm. Unreasonable fear cannot justify the use of deadly force. The use of deadly force must be objectively reasonable and necessary, given the totality of the circumstances.Based upon our thorough and exhaustive review of the facts of this case, it is my conclusion that the use of deadly force by Officer Yanez was not justified and that sufficient facts exist to prove this to be true. Accordingly, we filed a criminal complaint this morning in Ramsey County District Court charging Officer Yanez with Second Degree Manslaughter in the death of Philando Castile and two felony counts of Dangerous Discharge of a Firearm that endangered the safety of Diamond Reynolds and her four-year-old daughter, the two passengers in the car.

 

I fear that the jury’s findings only corroborate that the American people do not mind that their police frequently act lawlessly. Moreover, I fear that the American people do not mind, even more, that their police frequently act even more lawlessly to the black community in their nation.

Tom Kelly, who represented Mr. Yanez in court, has defended the killing, arguing: “This incident had nothing to do with race. It had everything to do with the presence of a gun. Race did not play a part in the use of deadly force at all. It was the presence of a gun.”

However, the presence of a gun alone should not be considered a just reason for violence, for if it were the police would have a just reason for shooting at a large fraction of the Americans they interact with. In Washington DC v. Heller, the Supreme Court has upheld that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms entirely unconnected with service in a militia. As a result of the Second Amendment, American police must frequently interact with people who lawfully carry firearms.

If Attorney Kelly is right that Mr. Yanez’s actions were just because there was a gun present, then no American who lawfully owns and carries a firearm would be safe interacting with the police. The law, which is supposed to guarantee domestic tranquility and the blessings of liberty among other things, would therefore no longer be doing anything of the sort. Law-abiding Americans would no longer be protected by their law and their interactions with the police are made just that more anarchic. 

In this case, Mr. Yanez is ultimately more than a private citizen. Instead, he is an agent of the state and a member of the police-force in a nation in which the police have frequently chosen to defend their own interests above the general welfare. The shooting of a black man only puts these roles in greater clarity.

The problems are then much wider in scope than Mr. Yanez himself. These problems highlight that there is a structural problem with the police, including the heinous war on drugs, that have frankly given them the power to oppress the black community. Given Attorney Kelly’s defense of Mr. Yanez’s actions, blacks can no longer be confident that they even have Second-Amendment rights.

To me, the jury's decision is clear: The police have a license to kill in this country. That affects blacks much, much more than it does whites. For durable progress to be made on race in this nation, we, the people, need to rescind that license to kill. The police must be made accountable to those that they are said to serve, and right now, they have given American blacks every reason to believe their interests ultimately conflict.

What to do, you ask? The first thing that should be done is to immediately end the war on drugs, which disproportionately harms the black community and which has given the police so many opportunities to exercise unlawful power over the black community.


Addendum:
David French, of The National Review, has commented on the case in "The Philando Castile verdict was a miscarriage of justice":

In recent months we’ve seen a number of cases where courts have excused police for shooting citizens even after the police made mistakes — and the citizens were doing nothing wrong — simply because these citizens were exercising their Second Amendment rights. This is unacceptable, and it represents the most extreme possible deprivation of civil rights and civil liberties.

I understand the inherent danger of police work. I also understand the legal responsibilities of men and women who volunteer to put on that uniform, and the legal rights of the citizens they’ve sworn to protect and serve. I’m aware of no evidence that Yanez panicked because Castile was black. But whether he panicked because of race, simply because of the gun, or because of both, he still panicked, and he should have been held accountable. The jury’s verdict was a miscarriage of justice.

Taking Equilibrium Too Seriously

In “All Systems Will be Gamed,” chapter six of Complexity and the Economy, Brian Arthurs argues that economics lacks a failure mode analysis of how systems work analogous to stress testing in structural engineering. The reason economics doesn’t have such a mode of analysis, Arthur argues, is that economists work with equilibrium assumptions that assume away the exploitive behavior that such stress tests are trying to predict: 

Economic analysis assumes equilibrium of the system in question, and by definition equilibrium is a condition where no agent has any incentive to diverge from its prevent behavior. It follows that for any system being studies no invasive or exploitive behavior cannot happen. If such a system could be invaded, some agents would be initiating new behavior, and the system could not have been in equilibrium. Equilibrium economics then, by its base assumptions, is not primed to look for the exploitation of systems, and as a result systemic studies of how systems might fail or be exploited are not central to how the discipline thinks. (Arthur 2014: 104).

As will be clear to those who read the book, Brian Arthurs really has an issue with equilibrium that becomes a consuming obsession. There is much to be said about the economics profession’s probable abuse of the notion of equilibria. Nevertheless, in attacking the concept, Arthurs does exactly what those who abuse equilibrium do: He takes equilibrium too seriously. As a conceptual tool, equilibrium is a useful way of constructing systems that can improve our understanding of the world. It’s only when we presume that we therefore assume away the unknown unknowns of life, to borrow Donald Rumsfeld’s illuminating phrase, through our systems that we err, yet that is an error Arthur makes himself with his own complexity approach.

 

Such system building isn’t bad per se. Indeed, it is neither good nor bad per se. Building systems, however primitive they may be, is one of the ways that the human mind comes to understand the world surrounding it. The men of system who helped to set up the 2008 Financial Crisis, be they investors who utilized a ridiculous degree of leverage or regulators who pushed value at risk as the way of doing risk management, made the fatal mistake of thinking that their systems were near perfect approximations of the real economy. They were the ones who assumed away tail risks and presumed that they knew enough to end history. The presumption of knowing all of the facts, not the presumption that an economy tends towards equilibrium is what did those men of the system in. (After all, it is very possible for an economy to be heading towards equilibrium and the people within it being wrong about what equilibrium it is tending towards.) 

Brian Arthur has nothing to say about such systems in his article. Instead, he wrongly believes that the sin was in the assumption of equilibrium, rather than in the presumption of knowledge. “Failure-mode studies are not at the center our our discipline for the simple reason that economics’ adherence to equilibrium analysis assumes that the system quickly settles to a place where no agent has an incentive to diverge from its present behavior, and so exploitive behavior cannot happen” (Ibid: 117).  

 

Yes, the assumption of equilibrium does bring much presumption of knowledge if one takes the assumption too seriously. But as a modeling tool, it is more thematic, providing the opportunity for a system builder to provide a coherent narrative, than descriptive. It is only when we assume, as do many equilibrium theorizers do, that Even the use of engineering as the chosen parallel over the course of the article betrays Arthur’s perspective as one who believes that it is possible for economists to reliably foresee how systems are exploited: “Once we have identified where and how exploitation might take place, we can break open the overall economic model of the policy system at this location, and insert a module that ‘injects’ the behavior we have in mind” (Arthur 2014: 111). 

In his very own vision of stress testing economic systems, Arthur still presumes that how the system will be exploited can become a known known, manipulable by analysts, but it’s the unknown unknowns that should be keeping policymakers awake at night. Brian Arthur’s conviction that policy can be improved by using stress-test analysis ignores that policymakers are already trying to figure out how the incentives impel people to take certain courses of action in different policy environments. Contra Arthur, the reason those policymakers make mistakes aren’t that they are working with equilibrium models, or that they aren’t sufficiently scientific. The reason is that no policymaker can’t know everything. 

 

 

Bibliography

Arthur, Brian W. 2014. Complexity and The Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

The Importance of Being Prepared

 

 

Just as fortune favors the brave, uncertainty benefits the prepared: 

For the show’s cinematographers, such as longtime Bourdain collaborator Zach Zamboni, that means adhering to Boy Scout levels of preparation.

“We do carry a lot of gear,” Zamboni says. “We’ve gone into a shoot with 11 different types of cameras before. The central concept of the show is this idea of getting lost; that you have to be lost in order to find something you haven’t seen before. So you have to be prepared when that happens.”

As Zamboni explains, even when a particular episode might be tackling a well-traveled, well-known location, the crew still puts a premium on “getting lost” in some fashion, even if that simply means shooting counterintuitively.

“‘Las Vegas’ was the first show we shot last year, and we decided we were going to keep the camera on the tripod until it was just painful to do so,” Zamboni relates. “Typically on a documentary shoot, you’re trying to capture reality as it happens, and you become adept at framing the chaos of reality, picking up the camera to apply your sense of blocking and framing to improve on reality. But when you’re confined to the tripod, there’s a whole new level of discipline. You’re almost going against your own basic cinematic instincts.

“Philosophically, it’s very much like travel, where if you want to see something new, it’s got to be challenging and scary for you. Otherwise you’re just treading the same territory.”

 As Lord Baden-Powell once said: Be prepared. Don't find yourself fragile to the unseen event, find yourself in a position to be antifragile to it.

What is Complexity?

 

Melanie Mitchell, an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, provides a quick description of how the study of complexity can influence our understanding of the world in "How Can the Study of Complexity Transform Our Understanding of the World?" A short excerpt: 

The “study of complexity” refers to the attempt to find common principles underlying the behavior of complex systems—systems in which large collections of components interact in nonlinear ways. Here, the term nonlinear implies that the system can’t be understood simply by understanding its individual components; nonlinear interactions cause the whole to be “more than the sum of its parts.”

Complex systems scientists try to understand how such collective sophistication can come about, whether it be in ant colonies, cells, brains, immune systems, social groups, or economic markets.  People who study complexity are intrigued by the suggestive similarities among these disparate systems.  All these systems exhibit self-organization: the system’s components organize themselves to act as a coherent whole without the benefit of any central or outside “controller”.  Complex systems are able to encode and process information with a sophistication that is not available to the individual components. Complex systems evolve—they are continually changing in an open-ended way, and they learn and adapt over time. Such systems defy precise prediction, and resist the kind of equilibrium that would make them easier for scientists to understand. 

Most discussions of complexity go without a very good definition of what complexity is, so Mitchell's essay is certainly valuable in helping us focus on exactly what we mean by "complexity." 

 

Nassim N. Taleb provides his own description of the essential features of complexity in Antifragile:

The organic-machanical dichotomy is a good starter distinction to build intuitions about the difference between two kinds of phenomena, but we can do better. Many things such as society, economic activities and markets, and cultural behavior are apparantly man-made but grow on their own to reach some kind of self-organization. They may not be strictly biological in that, in a way, they multiply and replicate - think of rumors, ideas, technologies, and businesses. They are closer to the cat than to the washing machine but tend to be mistaken for washing machines. Accordingly we can generalize our distinction beyond the biological-nonbiological. More effective is the distinction between noncomplex and complex systems. 

Artificial, manmade mechanical and engineering contraptions with simple responses are complicated, but not "complex," as they don't have interdependencies. You push a buttom, say, a light switch, and get an exact response, with no possible ambiguity in the consequences, even in Russia. But with complex systems, interdependencies are severe. You need to think in terms of ecology: if you remove a specific animal you disrupt a food chain: its predators will starve and its prey will grow unchecked, causing complications and series of cascading side effects. Lions are exterminated by the Canaanites, Phoenicians, Romans, and later inhabitants of Mount Lebanon, leading to the proliferaton of goats who crave tree roots, contributing to the deforestation of mountain areas, consequences that are hard to see ahead of time. Likewise, if you shut down a bank in New York, it will cause ripple effects from Iceland to Mongolia. 

In a complex world, the notion of "cause" itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined - another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things (Taleb 2013, 56). 

 

The notion of complexity and its implications for our cheished notion of causality has important implications for what it means to understand the world. The idea that in order to have knowledge of the world, we have to know its causes dates at least as far back as Plato's "Meno," and Aristotle provided a mature description of the doctrine in The Physics:

For the point of our investigation is to acquire knowledge, and prerequisitve for knowing anything is understanding why it is - in other words, grasping its primary cause. Obviously, then, this is what we have to do in the case of coming to be and ceasing to be, and natural change in general. Then, once we know the principles of these things, we can try to analyze anything we are looking into in terms of these principles (Aristotle. Phys II.3.194b18-22, trans. Waterfield).

The attempt to try and discover general causes of things within a complex system shall always fail. Whereas we can provide a general discription of a complex system like an ecosystem, as Taleb did above, we can never identify the exact causes. Instead, all we can do is to point out that there were certain patterns of events which lead to the creation of the world as we see it, and to humbly accept that we shall be able to go no further than that rough description. Rather than trying to understand those systems in terms of the arrow of causality, we can only understand them in terms of patterns, and that is how the notion of complexity should change our basic world view. 

 

 

Bibliography

Aristotle. The Physics. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile. New York: Random House, 2013.

Liturgy: Pointing Towards the Eternal

 

Unspontaneity is of their essence. In these rites I discover that something is approaching me here that I did not produce myself, that I am entering into something greater than myself, which ultimately derives from divine revelation. This is why the Christian East calls the liturgy the "Divine Liturgy", expressing thereby the liturgy's independence from human control.

-Benedict XVI, The Spirit of the Liturgy

 

From Gracy Olmstead’s “Why Millennials Long for Liturgy” in The American Conservative:

America’s youth are leaving churches in droves. One in four young adults choose “unaffiliated” when asked about their religion, according to a 2012 Public Religion Research Institute poll, and 55 percent of those unaffiliated youth once had a religious identification when they were younger. Yet amidst this exodus, some church leaders have identified another movement as cause for hope: rather than abandoning Christianity, some young people are joining more traditional, liturgical denominations—notably the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox branches of the faith. This trend is deeper than denominational waffling: it’s a search for meaning that goes to the heart of our postmodern age.

…..

Nelson believes a sacramental hunger lies at the heart of what many millennials feel. “We are highly wired to be experiential,” he says. In the midst of our consumer culture, young people “ache for sacramentality.”

“If you ask me why kids are going high church, I’d say it’s because the single greatest threat to our generation and to young people nowadays is the deprivation of meaning in our lives,” Cone says. “In the liturgical space, everything becomes meaningful. In the offering up of the bread and wine, we see the offering up of the wheat and grain and fruits of the earth, and God gives them back in a sanctified form. … We’re so thirsty for meaning that goes deeper, that can speak to our entire lives, hearts, and wallets, that we’re really thirsty to be attached to the earth and to each other and to God. The liturgy is a historical way in which that happens.”

The millennial generation is seeking a holistic, honest, yet mysterious truth that their current churches cannot provide. Where they search will have large implications for the future of Christianity. Protestant churches that want to preserve their youth membership may have to develop a greater openness toward the treasures of the past. One thing seems certain: this “sacramental yearning” will not go away.

  

One of the greatest advantages of sacramental religion is that it is religion which seeks to make the eternal, not the day’s concern, its focal point. The words of the Catholic mass are recited by the priest day in and day out the world over without change. While that might seem unnecessarily stiff prima facie, a closer look reveals the brilliance of such a sacramental way of doing things: The mass stands apart from the secular world of Heraclitean flux to point towards God set above that constant churning. 

 

Sacramental religions also have the great advantage of being religions of dogma. The word “Dogma” is more often than not a word that is immediately off-putting for people who are used to the changing standards of the secular world. However, we must never forget that a world of religion is a world of truths. That can never be forgotten. Although the norms of society may forever change, the teachings from God are infallible and shall always remain a constant. An unchanging God implies unchanging truths about that God. Without dogma, we would never be able to orientate ourselves towards that being, and liturgical religion understands that point so far as to implement it into its mundane habits of worship. Those of the liturgy are a means by which a believer can orientate herself towards the divine within a hectic world of change, and thus come to friendship with God.

Uncertainty and the Gun

 

 

"You were wrong for years, right for a moment, losing small, winning big, so vastly more successful than the other way around (actually the other way would be bust)."

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

 

 

 “Do not play with guns!” “Do not point a gun at something you’re not willing to destroy!” These are common maxims of handling firearms. Simply, easy to comprehend, yet capable of savings thousands of lives across the world each year if they were fully heeded.

The injunction is also one that serves as a proper paragon for acting within an uncertain world. It depends neither on exact knowledge of either the changes of there being a round in the chamber nor knowledge of the payoffs involved. Instead, it relies on the recognition that, even though most events would may very well have inconsequential results, a single devastating outcome is possible. Therefore, uncertain about whether the gun is loaded, we ought to avoid playing with it to avoid this catastrophic event.

Most orthodox decision theorists would go about the problem simply by using the statistical device of expected value. With this perspective, one should play with the gun if and only if the expected benefits exceed the expected costs, with the expectation function being the payoff, whether that is the cost or benefit, multiplied by its chance of happening. This statement can be simply stated as:

i) E[B]-E[C]= b.p_b-b.p_c>0

To get the command not to play with the gun, one can easily assign a cost of negative infinity to the costs of dying to provide, under any situation – no matter how sure we are that the gun is unloaded, to never play with a gun.

From a practical perspective, this is clearly not a sound maneuver since there are worse things than dying, especially dying from a gun-shot wound. One can lose everything, have everyone one loves executed and then be hung, drawn and quartered. That is surely worse than being killed by the gun. Even killing a loved one instead of dying oneself from the action may very well be a worse outcome.

However, since we have assigned the payoff to dying from the gun as negative infinity, we are unable to make any outcome worse within the model; ergo, dying as a result from playing with the gun is not infinitely negative. It is some other number.

I’m confident most orthodox decision theorists would here make that cost low enough so as to overwhelm the expected payoff of playing with the gun, and so yield the reasonable answer prima facie not to play with the gun. This may be something fully in line with how most philosophers do decision theory, but there is an ad-hoc aspect to that solution that does not settle well with me.

After all, a theory that can explain everything explains nothing. If we go about fine tuning the parameters of (i) in any way necessary to get the desired outcome, then we aren’t actually saying that much. In addition, these concerns are heightened by the use of equations like (i) to not only explain normative behavior, but positive behavior in the world. (I) can just easily say that a person’s actions reflect that they estimated the expected benefits of her actions to be more than the expected costs of her actions as they can say that a person ought to act only if she expects the expected benefits to overwhelm the expected costs. So which one is it?

In addition, most decision theorists are cheating here. They're cheating because they're basing their method for how they go about fine tuning the parameters of (I) to get what they believe ex ante to be the proper course of action. That's neither a helpful nor an insightful theory; to the contrary, it is simply at best a post-hoc rationalization, and intellectual masturbation at worst. The decision theorist already knows, without needing the framework of (i), not to play with the gun, but what leads to that decision. I would wager it is because he understands that playing with the gun involves small rewards, the fun of playing with the gun, at the risk of horrific injury.

This judgment is much more in line with the rule-based heuristic above of avoiding situations with low payoffs and high rewards. Rather than being concerned about the expected benefit of playing with the gun, the decision theorist, without even realizing it, prima facie looks at the distribution of the payoffs involved and realizes that there in a very undesirable outcome within the distribution that ought to guide his concern. Then, rather than basing his statement for why not to play with the gun based on that distribution of payoffs, he then goes, and uses a calculated average in order to justify it. The decision theorist is thus cheating

Within a world of uncertainty, such as when we simply do not know if the gun is loaded and any guess as to the probability is simply making a figure up, we should act so as to put ourselves in the position to gain from the uncertainty. It’s not because we know that the expected payoff to playing with the gun is negative that we ought to play with the gun. Instead, it is that, even though we do not know the odds of the gun being loaded, we recognize a situation in which there are there are drastically undesirable outcomes that may be smothered away by the expecations functions of (i).

Knowing that all it takes for one of those violent outcomes to be realized is a single te with that intuition in mind we avoid the gun. No calculations of costs and benefits necessary, just recognition of the distribution of the payoffs, which we can infer from a rather elementary familiarity with firearms and human anatomy. Even if the expected payoff of playing with the gun were sufficiently high that expected-value theory would recommend playing with it (imagine a billionaire offering millions for someone to play), we know that the expected value hides a catastrophe (and its all fun and millions until someone gets shot in the head). Being right even a hundred times when playing with a gun and then being wrong on the next is much, much worse than not playing at all.

 

Recognizing the involved distribution of payoffs allows us to act so as to avoid those catastrophes. We don’t understand the world, it is simply opaque to us, and to prosper in this environment, we should act so as to benefit from that uncertainty. To state that we should never play with guns because even a positive expected value from the act hides a catastrophe is to act so as to take advantage of the uncertainty to aid our survival. It doesn’t matter that we think we know the odds of the gun being unloaded because we may be wrong, and so rather than that “may be wrong” perhaps emerging from the dark cloud of uncertainty, like one of Pacific Rim's kaiju, to destroy us, we use that uncertainty to guide us along a better course of action.