I want a second opinion

The story goes that a mentally unstable and unattractive woman was seeing a psychiatrist.  She had been seeing him for awhile and no diagnosis of her difficulties was forthcoming.  "Well," the shrink said, when pressed, "You're crazy."

"I demand a second opinion," said the patient.

"OK.  You're ugly," responded the psychiatrist.

It isn't a pretty story, but it brings the hearer abruptly up against some other possible meanings of "second opinion."  There has been a lot of enthusiasm, lately, for the assessment of professionals by non-professionals.  There was an interesting piece in this morning's New York Times (here) about the online evaluation of medical doctors.

Here are two engaging paragraphs from that article.

Companies have tried to collect reviews of doctors since the early days of the Web, and RateMDs.com has gathered more than most. The founder, John Swapceinski, was inspired to create it after his success with a site called RateMyProfessors.com, which is well known for the “hotness” rating that college students assign (or not) to their teachers.

“Anything that people spend time or money on ought to be rated,” he said. RateMDs now has reviews of more than 1,370,000 doctors in the United States and Canada.

My first concern is the criterion of "hot" to rate university professors.  Over the forty years of so that I have been a professor, I have had me really good days in class and my really bad days.  I don't think I have every impressed anyone as "hot."  So the use of this criterion is not good news for me.  Also, I wonder whether one student who used that word to describe a professor would mean the same thing another student meant.  Beyond that, there is the question of the variety of uses to which the "hotness" criterion should be put.  Is there a relationship, for instance, between the availability of hot professors and the proportion of students who graduate within five years?

My second concern is with the standard John Swapceinski uses for rating.  "Anything that people spend time or money on," he says, "should be rated."  That seems overbroad to me.  Possibly, I have been reading too much about pure research and how hard it is to make the case for funding.  And as someone who spends a fair amount of time on his marriage, I wonder about the implication that I should be "rating" it.  On "hotness," possibly.

Seriously, I do have two sensible concerns.  The first is that students or patients will be competent to judge all aspects of their teachers or doctors.  My students know whether I come to class on time, they know whether I am egregiously partisan, they know whether I have enough office hours, they know whether I confuse them.  Probably, they do not know whether the confusion they experience from time to time is a stage necessary to the acquisition of new concepts or whether if comes from my own failure to explain.  It's an important distinction.  Every student who thinks about it, knows whether he or she is confused.  Only the best ones, and only by the end of the term, know whether it was necessary and worthwhile.

The second sensible concern I have is whether students can be trusted to voice the opinions they actually have.  That isn't as easy as it might seem.  It requires that I screen out my own feelings so that I can make a correct and useful assessment.  It means not giving high marks to the professors I like when they don't deserve them.  It means not giving high marks to professors I don't like when they don't deserve them.

Imagine that a student has been in to see me about a grade he thinks is too low.  It may be "too low" for purposes of his own, like graduating on time.  It may be "too low" in that the student thinks the answer is worth more than I think it is worth.  I am persuaded, let's say, that his is answer is notably worse than the other fifty answers to this question that I have read and I tell him, on that basis, that I cannot revise it upward.  He is angry because he knows it is something I could do and might even imagine that the score I recorded had to do with feelings I had toward him.  In any case, he leaves the office angry.

At the next class session, he is given a course evaluation form that will go straight to the head of my division.  If he goes through the unpleasant effort of screening out his personal feelings so that he can pass on a valid assessment, the purpose of the evaluation process will have been met.  If he treats the evaluation as a chance to get back at me for my refusal to raise his grade and, in that way, to meet his need, the purpose of the evaluation process will not have been met.

The student knows what his opinion is.  And he knows he is angry.  The struggle of which "truth" to pass on is sometimes, I am sure, fierce, and I am not sure that the better angels of his nature always triumph.

Republican Polar Bears

One of the most surprising events of recent years is the death by drowning of polar bears.  Polar bears are some of the strongest swimmers in the world of mammals.  Why are they drowning?  Well, it turns out that that as the polar caps melt, the bears have to go farther and farther from their natural home to find food.  Sometimes they make it back safely; sometimes they don't.

That strikes me as a dilemma unexpectedly similar to what the current crop of Republican candidates face.  Most of the undergraduates I teach don't know this, but for most of the 20th Century, the Republican party was the party of social moderation and fiscal restraint.  Republican candidates campaigned by referring to their party that way (the G in GOP meant "grand," although it is hard to remember it today) and promised that, if elected, they would govern that way.

Then the ice caps began to melt.  Party primaries became the principal route to the presidential nomination.  Discussions by party elders in smoke-filled rooms were superceded.  Then, as the parties became more ideologically consistent, the most extreme fringes of the parties took over the presidential primaries.  These extremists have long provided most of the funds and most of the workers for candidates.  Funds and volunteers are the food that has traditionally sustained candidates.  Where does that leave us? 

Any Republican who wants to be president will need to go to where the resources are, just as the polar bears must.  The distance between where the party has always lived--the prudent center--and where candidates must now go to get access to those resources has gotten larger and larger, just as it has for the bears.  Not all the candidates can manage the growing gap between the governing center and the campaigning resources and more and more of them drown in transit.  Actually, some of the best potential candidates decide not to make the trip at all.  If only that were an option for the bears!

There are two ways out of this swim to death.  The party elders, if there are still party elders, will need to recover control of the party and choose candidates who don't have to swim that far to get to the feeding grounds.  That's probably what will happen eventually, but it isn't going to be this year.  The second is that Republican moderates (and I know there are still Republican moderates because they complain to me that their party has forsaken them) will flow into the primaries and provide resources closer to the natural home of the Republican party.  "Closer" means that fewer candidates will drown trying to cross the open ocean between where they live--and where they will have to be if they are going to govern--and where they feed, where they must be if they are to endure the grueling nomination process.

Thinking now only of the political side of this analogy, I think that some Republicans--the elders or the voters--will have to find a way to reverse the global warming that has endangered their party.  Either that, or they will need to find a better answer to God's question to Noah in Bill Cosby's famous skit: "Noah.  Can you swim?"

Why Do They Bother Voting?

I’ve been looking at the results of the most recent New York Times/CBS Poll.  It’s about a week old now; recent, as polls go.  It seems like a real shame that we have to go through all the fuss and bother of having an election because, clearly, no one can be trusted with a public office.  Any public office.

Let’s see what we have here.  The national economy is bad.  If you add the “fairly bad” and “very bad” scores, you get 80%  Looking back, we see that the percent of people who thought things were pretty good came down under 50% in 2007 and have been headed mostly down ever since.  And it’s getting worse.  If you add together the “about the same” and “getting worse” scores, you get 85%.   Have things gotten “pretty seriously off on the wrong track?”  Yes they have, say 74% of those polled.

Trust in government to help?  The question asks whether you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right: the options are “always/most of the time” and “some of the time/never.”  That second measure is chosen by 89% of the people in this poll.

How about Barack Obama’s handling of things?  Not so good.  Only 50% approve of his handling of foreign policy; only 38% his handling of the economy; only 35% his efforts at job creation.

Congress?  In single digits for the first time since polling was begun.  Who are the 9% who approve of “the way Congress is handling its job?”

So let’s see if I’ve got this.  Things are bad and they are getting worse.  The government can be trusted to do the right thing seldom or never.  The President is handling his job poorly.  The Congress is disastrously bad.

A little over 80% of those polled said they were registered to vote.  About 40% of that 80% are going to vote in a Democratic primary.  That’s a little less than a third of the eligible voters by my calculation.  Another 32% of the 80% plan to vote in a Republican primary.  That’s another 26% of the eligible voters. 

That’s a lot of people.  You have to wonder why they bother.

Vituperation

It's hard to keep the notion of attributing a cause separate from the notion of casting blame.  That seems a shame.  The Latin, at least, is clear.  Casting blame can be fairly called "vituperation."  It's a combination of vitium, "fault" and parare, "to make or prepare." 

So "making a fault" falls on the "casting blame" side.  Causal attribution has nothing to do with fault.  It seems that it ought not to be as hard as it is to keep them separate.

Race Relations in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1950s

I just saw the movie, "The Help."  Who would have imagined you could pivot the entire plot of a movie on a single instance of scatophagy?

I'm the President, and I'm Mad as Hell

Barack Obama was elected president for two reasons. The first is that he did not rise in anger to the baiting of his opponents. Nor the baiting of his friends either, but that is a more complicated matter. The prospect of campaigning against an “angry young black man” was so attractive to various Republicans that they tried very hard to get him to say something angrily on television.

The second is that he promised bipartisanship. “There are not red states and blue states,” candidate Obama proclaimed several hundred times, “There is the United States of America.” Partisan gridlock in Congress was already a grievance to independent voters and campaigning against it was a really smart move.

That was then. This is now.

The New York Times editorialized this morning that President Obama is finally starting to do it right. He is on a bus tour in the Midwest and at every stop, he is showing his anger at the failure of the Congress to act responsibly and is blaming the Republicans for the current impasse. Maybe the Times thinks that Obama can afford to be the “angry young black man” now that he’s president. Maybe the Times is so angry and partisan that it can’t appreciate a president who is not as angry and partisan as they are. Maybe the Times thinks that the country is now hungry for an angry and partisan president.

I don’t know, but I’m partial to explanation number 2, myself.

CBS/New York Times Poll, August 2011

There has been so much hand-wringing about the debt-limit debate. All of it justified, in my opinion. A few posts ago, I compared it to a “game” of Russian roulette rather than the more common metaphor of a “game” of chicken.

Then I read the New York Times/CBS Poll for August 2 and 3 and it occurred to me that it is always possible that democracy might solve our problem this time. Maybe not. I’m not predicting anything. But I do want to pause briefly to talk about the much-maligned “responsible party model” (RPM).

Here’s the way I talk about it in PS 102. In Step 1, policy-oriented parties recruit candidates who will support those policies and fund their campaigns. If you want a policy-oriented national party, you can’t have yellow dog Democrats running in liberal districts and blue dog Democrats running in conservative districts—and then voting against each other in Congress. In Step 2, the parties run policy-oriented campaigns (rather than personality-oriented ones). The party that wins the majority now has an elected majority capable of fulfilling the party’s promises—more like the situation we expect in parliamentary systems. So in Step 3, the party in power enacts and approves the policies it campaigned on. Then, in Step 4, the crucial step, they return to their constituents with a record to talk about. Maybe even the beginnings of actual achievements based on their legislative stewardship. At that stage, the party says, “We did what we said. How do you like it? If you send us back, we’ll do more of it, so consider your policy desires carefully.”

It isn’t very realistic in modern American politics, but you can see why I like it, right? I like that last stage particularly because it is the only circumstance under which people can evaluate actual policy-generated outcomes and say whether they like them. Evaluating promises and intentions is uncertain work; evaluating outcomes is more the kind of thing it is fair to expect voters to do.

So what about the Times/CBS poll? Here are some results that caught my eye. Obama’s approval rating is at 48%. It hasn’t been above 60% since June 2009 and it hasn’t been about 50% since April 2010 except for a one poll spike in May of this year. That was bin Laden’s execution, I suppose.

People are not happy about the way “things are going in Washington.” Combining the two least approving columns gets you 84%. Combining the two most approving columns gets you 15%.

Since June of last year, the percentage of people who disapprove the way Congress is “handling its job” has been above 70%, but it has moved from 70% in June to 82% in August. Here are some relevant additional figures. Approve of John Boehner? Yes, 30%, No, 57%. The way Republicans in Congress have handled the recent negotiations? Approve 21%, Disapprove 72% Approve Democrats in Congress (same question)? Approve 28%, Disapprove 66%. Do “most members” of Congress deserve to be re-elected? No, 74%

I see anger, frustration, and pain there. The natives are restless.

Who do you trust more to make the right decisions about the nation’s economy? Republicans in Congress, 33%; Barack Obama 47%. Is it better for the parties to compromise or stick to their positions? Compromise, 85%; hold fast, 12%. Who is mostly to blame? Here I’ll give you the current figure and the trend since the last poll. The Bush administration is to blame, 44%, up 3% since April; The Obama administration is to blame, 15% up 1% since April; the Congress is to blame, 15%, up 3% since April.

Who do you blame more of “the difficulties in reaching an agreement” on the debt ceiling? Republicans in Congress, 47%, Barack Obama and the Democrats 29%. Did the Republicans in Congress compromise too little? Yes, 52% (15% said “too much” and 32% said “the right amount.”) Did Barack Obama and the Democrats compromise too much? Yes, 26% (34% said too little and 32% the right amount.) Those percentages are roughly thirds; that’s very good for the Democrats. Are you optimistic about the ability of this Congress to deal with future issues? Yes, 12%, No 66%. Should taxes be increased above the $250,000 level to help balance the budget? Yes, 63%, No 34%.

So that’s how Americans were feeling earlier in the week. What if the RPM kicks in for the general elections in the fall of 2012? People who said they absolutely would not raise taxes run into an electorate two thirds of them disagrees with them and now these “candidates” are incumbents and they are presenting what they have done, not what they promised to do. That doesn’t seem a good prospect for Republicans in Congress who campaigned on holding firm and not compromising and who signed a no tax pledge.

If I were Barack Obama, I would make the campaign about whether you want actual adults in charge of the economy or adolescent zealots. I would NOT make the campaign about whether I had done a good job of managing the economy over my first term, but in trying to avoid that, I would be helped by the 44% who still blame the Bush administration for what is wrong with the economy.

If the voters react in 2012 by rewarding people who promise to compromise and to include more revenue in out “living within our means” issue, then democracy will have done what it is supposed to do. It will have registered the judgments of actual voters on actual outcomes. If the voters felt otherwise—if they felt, for instance, that the economy wasn’t all that bad in 2009 and that Obama should have fixed it by now—then democracy would work exactly the same way and the Democrats would be slaughtered by the new round of votes.

But I don’t think they will be.