A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on January 28th, 2008 in Ridin' Herd

A quick stab at the deep is kind of long, but makes good reading.

Well, the worst case of scope insensitivity I’ve ever heard of was described here by Slovic:

Other recent research shows similar results. Two Israeli psychologists asked people to contribute to a costly life-saving treatment. They could offer that contribution to a group of eight sick children, or to an individual child selected from the group. The target amount needed to save the child (or children) was the same in both cases. Contributions to individual group members far outweighed the contributions to the entire group.

There’s other research along similar lines, but I’m just presenting one example, ’cause, y’know, eight examples would probably have less impact.

If you know the general experimental paradigm, then the reason for the above behavior is pretty obvious – focusing your attention on a single child creates more emotional arousal than trying to distribute attention around eight children simultaneously. So people are willing to pay more to help one child than to help eight.

Now, you could look at this intuition, and think it was revealing some kind of incredibly deep moral truth which shows that one child’s good fortune is somehow devalued by the other children’s good fortune.

But what about the billions of other children in the world? Why isn’t it a bad idea to help this one child, when that causes the value of all the other children to go down? How can it be significantly better to have 1,329,342,410 happy children than 1,329,342,409, but then somewhat worse to have seven more at 1,329,342,417?

Interesting.

On that note, we consider if the torch is being passed.

Will we one day pine for the good old days of the Bush economy? Um, maybe not:

Actually, from a strict economic perspective President Bush is absolutely responsible for the fallout from the collapse of the housing bubble. Competent economists recognized the bubble and warned of the harm that would come from its inevitable collapse. President Bush absolutely can be blamed for the fact that he chose to ignore the bubble or that his economic team failed to recognize it.

Why is it news that a couple of US Senators will actually vote? Well, at least they are both planning to vote against telecom immunity.

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