Something about Krugman and Lyinginponds.com that started out to just be about this thing about Dean in the NYT Magazine

[some typos corrected]

1. I think this piece on the Dean campaign is worth reading. Now I really wish I had comments up, 'cause I really wonder what people in the Dean campaign think of it.

2. I'm listening to Krugman's book on tape (yeah, I know some people look down on books on tape, but (a) I don't care and (b) if you don't do your light "reading" on tape it cuts into your real reading time). It's primarily a compilation of his op-eds, so not much new if you've read all those. I think it's really interesting, and, though he's vehemently anti-Bush, that position certainly comes across as a reasonable one in that it seems to be motivated by a sincere (though, of course, possibly incorrect) assessment of the evidence. But I don't know enough about economics to speak with any authority on this matter.

(2'. This brings me to a general problem about the approach of Lyinginponds.com. They only count up pro-and-anti-Democratic and pro-and-anti-Republican comments. This approach assigns to everyone a numeric score that is, of course, an abstraction. Nothing wrong with abstraction so long as you don't forget that that's what it is. If you forget that you are dealing with an abstraction, then you commit--I think this is right--what Whitehead called "the fallacy of mis-placed concreteness." Well, never mind about that part. But mistaking something more abstract for something less abstract is an error, anyway. The weakness of the Lyinginponds approach (and remember, I like that site and find it helpful) is that it abstracts away from all content other than the pro- and anti- references aforementioned. That means that somebody smart, knowledgeable, and seemingly well-intentioned like Krugman gets put into (roughly) an equivalence class with people like Michael Moore and Anne Coulter. So, though this is informative, it isn't very informative. Hmm...wait, that may not be right. How about: it is easy to exaggerate how informative that is? Reminds me of an instructive case in one of W. V. Quine's logic papers (Not in Methods of Logic I don't think...can't remember where...not my example anyway, I'm swiping it from one of my old instructors). You can, of course, build a logical language with only one (non-logical) predicate in it. So, for example, you can construct a language in which the only (non-logical (I'll drop this qualifier hereafter, since it might either be confusing or sound pedantic)) predicate is the ...is longer than... relation. And you can even use that (radically impoverished) language to describe the world. You just don't get a very rich description. In this language, all objects fall into equivalence classes on the basis of their lengths. So a yardstick, a three-foot-long boa constrictor, a three-foot-long chunk of weapons-grade plutonium, and a three-foot high child are all the same from the perspective of the theory--the theory doesn't have enough expressive power to tell them apart. Theories like this (though not this particular theory) can be useful, but if you forget that you have abstracted away from all the other features of the world (other than length) you are making a really big mistake. You are, in particular, forgetting that the things that are the same in a particular (and perhaps useful) abstract sense are different in lots of other ways. (Uh...did that make anything clearer?)

Let's say that people who get equal scores by Lyinginponds are "LiP-equivalent". Of course two people X and Y might be LiP-equivalent even though X is reasonable and Y is not. Krugman and Coulter are, for example, roughly LiP-equivalent, but I assert that the former is pretty sensible and the latter is a nut. So why are LiP scores interesting? (Whew...talk about a long road to a small house) Because such scores are indicators--though very imperfect indicators--of how reasonable someone is. It is somewhat more likely that someone who criticizes the two parties in roughly equal proportions is more reasonable than someone who heaps most of his criticism on one party. If someone has a really high LiP score, this should give us pause and a reason to be especially attentive to the particulars of their arguments. But a high LiP score in and of itself is not clearly an indictment. There's no substitute for analyzing their actual arguments. And, of course, when you do that Krugman and Coulter are in different universes.

Some of this has to do with an ambiguity in 'partisan'. A partisan might be someone with an irrational commitment to a party, someone who, e.g., is willing to distort evidence in order to provide rhetorical support to that party; or a partisan might be someone who, for perfectly cogent reasons, simply happens to agree with a party on a great many things. (This latter sense may not actually be a legitimate sense of 'partisan'...I dunno.) The former is a kind of intellectual dishonesty, while the latter is not. Still, if all you know about someone is that she agrees with one party a lot, you don't know whether she is a partisan in the bad sense or in the innocuous (and possibly not even legitimate sense of 'partisan') sense. So a high LiP score sends up a red flag, but that's all it does. Only serious attention to the claims and arguments of the person in question can reveal whether that person and that person's arguments are reasonable or unreasonable.

One last thing: the more radical party A becomes, or the more clearly bad its actions, the easier it is to be an innocuous (i.e. not intellectually dishonest) "partisan" (in the possibly-not-even-a-legitimate-sense-of-'partisan' sense of 'partisan') of a party other than A. The Bush administration is extremely right-wing, and has done a lot of obviously bad things, including telling a lot of obvious and important lies. One consequence of these facts is that people who speak the truth about the Bush Administration will seem "partisan."

Ah...but of course this is exactly the kind of thing you would expect a partisan to say, isn't it...

sigh)

(Um, I guess 2' turned out to be the main thought rather than an afterthought...)