Michel Balinski ‘54 and Majority Voting
Michel Balinski came to campus today for a Math/Stats colloquium and a well-attended presentation in Wege tonight. His presentation was on the problems with current voting systems, involving gerrymandering and how a minority can elect a majority, as is the case in the UK. This PDF is the hard academic text behind his work; I could not understand all of the involved math. Follow the jump for commentary.
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Professor Nolan: Not a fan of “Problem Solving” Courts
Professor Nolan is cited as the primary critic of problem solving courts (which provide alternatives to jail time for drug offenders) in this interesting article. Nolan opines:
Ideological critiques also tend to distract from what some see as structural flaws of problem-solving justice — and there are a few. Problem-solving justice’s most vocal critic is James Nolan Jr., a criminologist from Williams College in Massachusetts. He has dedicated a good portion of his career to writing articles and books challenging the approach, and his latest book, to be released in 2009, will compare the operations of problem-solving courts around the world.
Nolan’s chief criticism involves due process rights. “My concern is that if we make the law so concerned with being therapeutic, you forget about notions of justice such as proportionality of punishment, due process and the protection of individual rights,” Nolan says. “Even though problem-solving advocates wouldn’t want to do away with these things, they tend to fade into the background in terms of importance.”
Nolan offers an example, a drug court participant in Miami-Dade County who was forced to remain in the program for seven years. “So here, the goal is not about justice,” he says. “The goal is to make someone well, and the consequences can be unjust because they are getting more of a punishment than they deserve.”
With the caveat that I haven’t read anything more fleshed-out by Nolan, I disagree. As a former prosecutor, I’ve seen first-hand how habitual drug users are failed by the system, wasting tax payer dollars and law enforcement / judicial resources in the process. I don’t see a system which is not punitive as threatening due process — to the extent someone is marooned in the problem solving court for years, all that means is that they are a habitual drug user who would otherwise be in jail or dead. Moreover, many states impose — without violating due process — far more intrusive “non punitive” measures on habitual sex offenders (namely, locking them up indefinitely beyond the term of their sentence, if they are deemed a serious enough recidivist threat).
One thing is for sure, the system of locking up more and more people for drug use or petty crimes (small time dealing, shoplifting, larceny) associated with feeding their habits has proven not to work. I don’t see the harm in trying to be creative with a novel approach.
Looking for questions about Privacy in the 21st C.
Next month’s (Feb 2008) podcast for MIT Press is going to be different from the previous shows. Instead of separate interviews, I will be leading a discussion about the nature of privacy in the 21st century with Marc Rotenberg, Director of of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and co-editor of Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape and Susan Landau, Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems and co-author of Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption. MIT Press wants to include the public in on the discussion, so if you’d like to send a question along for me to ask either Mr. Rotenberg or Ms. Landau, send it along to publicity at mitpress dot mit dot edu. Please include your name and where you are writing from. The show will be recorded on Friday, Feb. 1st and be released that next week. Thanks.
Friedman on the Purple Bubble
Thomas Friedman has a new opinion piece out today regarding the lack of activism on college campuses, and specifically mentions Williams.
America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. That’s what twentysomethings are for — to light a fire under the country. But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them.
Real Constructive Criticism at Williams
. . . Education is partly a game which we agree to play, in which grades serve as tokens. . . . Most teachers (maybe all?) function as both “coaches” and “referees” in the game. As “coaches”, we think about grades, at least in part, as motivational tools. I think this is fine — so long as we also remain fair referees. If the referee is not perceived as fair, the game is undermined. . . .
We’ve recently been having a couple of discussions on Ephblog on good pedagogy, specifically how to criticize student work. Unfortunately, these have been less discussions than a not-unusual pitched battle between David Kane and the world, where David’s hastily-expressed prickly good intentions take on the more-hastily-expressed senses of discretion and decency of his readers.
We owe this topic a better effort if we want to not just read about, but talk about, what works and doesn’t work at Williams, and why. And though I believe Kane’s honest attempt at good criticism could have sparked a good discussion, I believe the sample of real criticism I can provide can be an even better touchstone.
Below the break is two long quotes, an exchange between myself and a professor over some work I’d produced. It is a real sample of real teaching through criticism at Williams, and his permission has been obtained to post his words here. I consider it the best I’ve received. It is both excellent criticism in itself as well as, most fortunately for us, a small treatise on pedagogical criticism.
I have personally benefited greatly from the thinking it conveyed to me. I hope it will inspire students to seek equally good exchanges, inspire professors whom I know think daily and deeply about how best to criticize, and spark among us a constructive discussion.
People Respond to Incentives (the latest in an ongoing series)
In that same vein, we apparently have a very good explanation why there are so many econ majors of late — basically, their starting salaries are 50% higher than those of “liberal arts majors”.
As noted in last semester’s post on Gender Disparities and Incentive Effects, people make decisions based on their potential options and the expectation value of those options’ outcomes.
The trend toward Econ majors (or double majors), especially compared to DivI majors, seems quite rational especially in light of the increasing financial incentives involved. This is not something that can be weeded out, at least not to a substantial extent, by the admissions process.
The way to do that would be to find a field that has a use for lots of (e.g.) English majors, that pays comparable salaries to starting Econ salaries, and has numerous employers both willing and able to pay an enormous number of non-quants such a premium salary while remaining solvent.
Let’s Make a Deal
A former college roommate called me with a probability question based on Let’s Make a Deal (yes, my friends are also geeks). The problem is commonly refered to as “The Monty Hall Problem” (after the host of Let’s Make a Deal) and has a clear solution.
My friend posed the question as follows:
Phase 1: Three doors are on stage and Monty asks you to guess which one the prize is behind. You select a door, say door #1. Monty opens an empty door that you did not pick, say door #2. Monty then asks if you would like to switch to door #3 or stay with door #1. Should you switch?
Phase 2: Suppose three people from the audience play the game at once and all three have to pick different doors. Suppose further that Monty reveals door #3 is empty and that player is eliminated. Should the people guessing door #1 and door #2 switch?
Phase 3: Suppose there are three people playing the game simultaneously, but they are unaware of each other’s presence. Should players switch doors?
Okay, so no one actually talks like that and I am paraphrasing my friend. But the gist of the question remain the same.
Have your answer?
