I had the opportunity recently to visit the renovated National Archives here in DC which recently reopened. In addition to the hall with the great documents, the Archives now has a terrific permanenent exhibit featuring the "National Archives Experience." The idea is that the archives aren't just the old documents, but rather is a trove of valuable research information, and so the purpose of the exhibit is to provide sort of a virtual research experience for tourists. So the exhibit features many of the different sorts of cool and weird things that someone could find in the archives, from video and audio of Presidents, to old Supreme Court briefs, to piles of immigration records. All very well presented. I recommend it highly the next time you are in town on a tourist trip.

I was especially pleased to see the high quality of museum because many of the same architects and designers have been retained for the museum project that I (and Eugene) are working on, through the McCormick Museum Foundation. Our museum, which will focus on American Freedoms and the First Amendment, is scheduled to open next Spring (Spring 2006).

"I got a FE-ver, and the only prescription . . . is more cowbell!" Blue Oyster Cult was in town last night (I did not attend, I went to a disappointing Jane Monheit performance at the Kennedy Center instead) and there is a hilarious article in today's Washington Post about the great Saturday Night Live skit a few years ago about a fictional recording session of "Don't Fear the Reaper." The article has a link to the SNL website where you can watch the skit itself. If you want to go straight to the skit it is at http://mknx.com/v/cowbell.wmv.

Update:

I got a FE-ver and the only prescription...is more links!

For those who can't get enough cowbell, herewith a smattering of related links from a reader:

You know what was missing from your "more cowbell" post?

More Links!

For example, http://morecowbell.net/ and http://www.dooce.com/archives/mastheads/09_07_2004.html

Rawk On, [Name]

Neither seems to have anything to do with Blue Oyster Cult or SNL (in fact, they are both a bit random), but consider this a public service for those who just can't get enough cowbell!

Update:

Yes-still more cowbell.

A few days ago I commented on a very thoughtful article by a Dartmouth student commenting on the lack of intellectual diversity at Dartmouth and his view of the negative effect that has on his educational experience. I have received several interesting follow-up emails from current students and recent grads making similar observations (although a few have disagreed).

Nick Desai, a current Dartmouth undergrad sent me the transcript of a remarkable set of remarks given by Professor Meir Kohn of the Economics Department, introducing Daniel Pipes as an on-campus speaker at Dartmouth earlier this week. I was going to try to pluck out a few tidbits to whet your appetite, but every sentence and paragraph is powerful. So I just encourage you to read it for yourself on Nick's blog which you can find here.

OK, I will give you one little bit from the beginning:

Today, I have the honor to welcome Daniel Pipes to Dartmouth.

Before I tell you a little of his background, I would like to say a few words about the greater significance of Dr Pipes's visit here.

Because this is indeed a significant event-- a triumph over the intellectually deadening effects of political correctness.

Whether you agree or disagree with Pipes's views, I encourage to read Professor Kohn's brief remarks introducing him and his criticism. I once heard John McGinnis refer to political correctness as "shackles of the mind"--a sentiment that is reflected in Professor Kohn's thoughtful remarks.

I was forwarded a remarkable column written by Dan Knecht, a senior at my alma mater Dartmouth and a columnist for The Dartmouth, the traditional campus newspaper. Entitled "The Monolith on the Hill," Knecht observes:

In my almost four years at Dartmouth, I have encountered more than a handful of dyed-in-the-wool liberals. I have yet to meet one conservative professor.

I don't know Knecht or his politics, but I think the valuable point of the column is simply to illustrate the harm to students and the educational process from a lack of diversity of intellectual opinion on campus.

When I was a Dartmouth students, conservatives were on the threatened species list. There were a few, including notables such as Roger Masters, Vincent Starzinger, Colin Campbell, and Jeffrey Hart. This is an eclectic group--Straussian, Traditionalist, Libertarian, Paleocon. And there weren't many of them, but at least you knew where you could go to get some ideas that might be different from everything else on campus. But every one of these guys is now retired, and from a review of Dartmouth's faculty today it appears that conservatives are now on the endangered species list. There are a few, but if Knecht is right, they remain pretty well undercover in dealing with the students.

Casual observation about Dartmouth thus seems consistent with Dan Klein's findings about academia in general and elite universities specifically (Berkeley and Stanford). Klein finds that not only are conservatives and libertarians dramatically outnumbered in academia, but that among younger professors, conservative thinkers are virtually nonexistent. Like Dartmouth, the handful of conservatives on the faculty continue to retire, never to be replaced by like-minded successors.

Let me make very clear--I am not calling for affirmative action for conservative professors or some such thing (so save your emails about what a hypocrite I am). All I am observing is that students such as Dan Knecht are increasingly becoming aware that they are being cheated by spending tens of thousands dollars per year and not getting a true liberal education.

Update:

A number of students and alumin of various schools have written me this morning to remind me that Dartmouth and "elite" schools are not unique in lacking intellectual diversity, which seems readily apparent to me from Dan Klein's study of the public policy views of academics nationwide. This particular column just caught my eye because it came from my alma mater.

This month's issue of the journal Regulation, also contains another article by yours trule (co-authored with Jerry Ellig and Asheesh Agarwal) on the policy considerations involved in the Supreme Court cases involving the direct shipment of wine. The article draws on empirical and other evidence to describe the benefits to consumers from direct wine shipment and the weakness of the policy arguments for protectionism. (It also has a funny graphic that the editor's added in). The article can be found on the web in the "Mercatus Reports" Section of Regulation, as one of my co-authors is a Senior Research Fellow at Mercatus. You can find the article , then scroll down to pages 10-11 of the magazine (pages 7-8 of the pdf file) to find our short article.

We also point out in our conclusion, this case has serious implications for e-commerce in all products, from Amazon.com to LLBean, in that either of the two routes to affirmance by the Supreme Court are plagued with difficulties.

First, the court could hold that the laws are nondiscriminatory because of the availability of a "physical presence" requirement. This would be most disastrous of all, as it would imply that a state could require Amazon.com, for instance, to establish a physical presence in the state in order to sell books there so that the state could effectively enforce its consumer protection laws.

Second, the court could hold that these laws are discriminatory, but nevertheless saved by the 21st Amendment. Thought perhaps not disastrous on the same scale, this justification would be troubling as well, in that it would signal a retreat from the Court's traditional commitment to the internal free flow of goods. Perhaps equally troubling, if the Court were to uphold this discrimination, in this case it would be doing so on the basis of a virtual absence of any evidence to justify the discrimination. From the beginning, the Court has insisted that discriminatory bans to commerce be permitted only after a strong evidentiary showing that the discrimination is the only way to address the claimed problem and that it is the least-restrictive means of doing so. Here, there is simply no evidence to support the discriminatory ban, our article describes the evidence on the other side.

will be forthcoming in the Green Bag. Co-authored by myself and my former colleague Asheesh Agarwal, "The Original Meaning of the 21st Amendment." For those who just can't wait, you can get it online at the Green Bag website. This is a shorter and more formal article version of some of the points I made this fall in my "Wine Wars" series of posts. I want to express sincere thanks to my George Mason colleague Ross Davies and the remarkable editors at the Green Bag for their wonderful editing process.

Although Justice O'Connor is a pivotal player in the Supreme Court wine direct shipment cases, it is nonetheless presumably just a coincidence that "the annotated Justice O'Connor bobblehead doll" is also featured in this issues of the Green Bag.

I thought readers might be interested in some correspondence that has followed up on my earlier post on Project Implicit. One person wrote (edited):

Perhaps your knee-jerk reaction was not to the Implicit Association Test but to the possibility that you are not always consciously in control of your beliefs and behaviors. If that is the case, then I am sorry to inform you that decades of research in neuroscience and psychology demonstrates that you are, in fact, in control of very little of your mental life. In fact, you're not even aware of most of it, and that includes your goals, motivations, and attitudes.

Now if this an accurate statement of the importance of subconscious reasoning (other correspondents did not state the position so strongly but made the same general points), it would seem to raise some pretty thorny questions. In particular, if this is true, it seems to necessarily imply that the primary reason why a person believes in the finding of the Implicit Association Test and the overwhelming importance of subconscious reasoning is primarily because there is something in that particular person's subconscious that makes them believe this theory as opposed to other competing theories. And, it would seem to follow, the reason why I am skeptical of some of the theory's more extravagant claims about what it can explain regarding personal beliefs and behaviors (such as my preference for Bill versus Hillary Clinton) is primarily because of something in my subconscious as well. In short, if the theory itself is correct, then one's belief about the validity of the theory itself must be the result of the same subconscious reasoning processes that it purports to explain. And if it is the case that our views on the usefulness of Project Implicit are little more than a reflection of our subconscious, wouldn't it be pointless to have a conversation trying to persuade me to use my conscious mind to revise my supposed subconsciously-biased negative opinion of Project Implicit itself? The fact that the correspondent took the time to write to me (which I always appreciate, by the way, although I would prefer if you would refrain from ad hominem attacks in your emails) suggests that she (subconsciously perhaps?) recognizes the limitations of her own theory.

As I said earlier, it seems much more plausible to me that there are some of our views and opinions that are a reflection of subconscious and others that overwhelmingly reflect the influence of our conscious minds and that we don't want to try to claim too much for either. Bill versus Hillary and Church versus State (the two tests I took) seem to me to fall much more on the conscious side of the line, and one suspects that the reason those modules are in there is so that Project Implicit can try to demonstrate just how broad its claims can reach. And to try get from subconscious attitudes to an explanation of many aspects of behavior and eventually large-scale social policy recommendations (as implied by the article in the Washington Post) seems like an extraordinary stretch to me.

Perhaps the architects of the Implicit Association Test should develop a new module that would be able to predict individual's views on the usefulness of the Implicit Association Test. If they find that individual's beliefs about the usefulness and explanatory power of the test itself are primarily a reflection of individual subconscious attitudes, then that would be some excellent supportive evidence for their theory. On the other hand, I wouldn't expect to see this test being run anytime soon.

Update:

Replies to this post and my original update can be found here and here for anyone who is interested. JohnHays.net agrees with me and concludes: "If the Implicit Project can be called science, then it is junk science. Not only is the methodology ridiculous, but the underlying premise behind each test I took was filled with biases that cannot be empirically proven." Another interesting question dealing with the falsifiability of the hypothesis is posed here.

I was born in Pittsburgh and I am a lifelong Steelers fan. Now my wife thinks I'm insane, just because I've started calling my two dogs "Bus" and "Duce." My older, larger yellow laborador retriever is the Bus (Jerome Bettis), of course, because his size and because he is yellow like a school bus. My chocolate lab puppy is "Duce" because in addition to being smaller in size and younger, she is also the "Number 2" dog (get it, "Duce" like "deuce" or #2). Seems perfectly logical to me, so I don't know why my wife thinks it is so crazy. I get the impression that she thinks I might be a bit overexcited about the game.

In a similar vein, I have been looking everywhere on line to try find the hilarious NFL "Time to Get Your Story Straight" commercial. This is the one that starts off with the text "Four Months Ago..." and then has all the guys making their various bad predictions (my favorite--"Ricky Williams has only one thing on his mind, and that's winning football games"). I couldn't find it on NFL.com when I looked recently and haven't been able to find it anywhere, so if anyone else has found it, please shoot me the link if you would. All I could find on NFL.com is its lame upcoming Super Bowl commercial with various guys singing "Tomorrow," which I didn't find very amusing.

A lot of stupid academic research goes on every day. Today's Washington Post magazine features one of the dumbest I have come across in some time--Project Implicit. According to the Project Implicit website its purpose is as follows:

It is well known that people don't always 'speak their minds', and it is suspected that people don't always 'know their minds'. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology.

This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short.

I took the test a few times. The first asked me to identify whether I preferred "Bill Clinton" or "Hillary Clinton", the second asked me whether I preferred "Church" or "State". I told the test that I didn't really like Bill or Hillary very much, but that I had a slight preference for Bill; and the same with Church versus State. It then led me through 10 minutes of various rapid association responses at which point it told me--drumroll--that I had a slight preference for Bill over Hillary and Church over State. The questions were focused on such things as whether I liked structure, rules, and predictability in my life. From what I can tell, these implicit associations supposedly drive my conclusions about public policy issues.

Is it really plausible that my impression of Bill and Hillary is driven more by whether I have a messy desk than my personal perception that Bill Clinton is a liar and Hillary Clinton is a megalomaniac and opportunist? Or, that my perception is that Bill's ideological views are only somewhat liberal, and Hillary's are very liberal, and therefore Bill's views are closer to mine than Hillary's? From what I can tell, this is about as scientific and insightful as a horoscope or palm reading. Needless to say, the Washington Post loves the research because it purports to demonstrate that deep down inside we are all racists. This may or may not be true, but I certainly didn't find anything in Project Implicit that would shed meaningful light on that question.

And, of course, none of this says anything at all about whether it actually explains how people act, or the extent to which our overall behavior and attitudes are shaped by these factors versus learned and conscious behaviors. I have little question that Project Implicit could demonstrate that I have a preference for cheesecake versus green beans, yet I eat green beans with dinner twice a week and cheesecake once a month.

Incidentally, for all our libertarian readers out there, you will be happy to know that I had to cancel one round of tests because it insisted that the "correct" association for "anarchy" was "chaos" rather than "order" and since I refused to give in it wouldn't let me proceed.

Update:

It appears that some commentators have misunderstood my criticism of project implicit (others share my assessment). Some have said that I am denying that part of our cognition occurs at a subconscious level that we cannot control (see here and here). That is not a correct interpretation of what I said in my original post. In fact, I agree that much of our cognition goes on beneath our subconscious awareness, so I am certainly not mocking that idea. Rather, I am in fact criticizing Project Implicit as a methodology for distilling unconscious attitudes--a concern which, ironically, my critics share. Second, while again I agree with the proposition that much of our thinking goes on at a subconscious level, it is a heckuva a long way from that observation to suggesting that may be the reason why I don't dislike Bill Clinton as much as I dislike Hillary Clinton. Like evolutionary psychology (which I have endorsed as being potentially very useful, see also my comments on Lawrence Summers here), I think the study of cognition and unconscious reasoning is very useful and explains much. I just think that it is important in studying this, as with everything else, that we remain aware of the limitations of the work and, in particular, make sure that the conclusions and implications we draw are actually supported by what the experiments are actually calibrated to test. Clearly many of my beliefs and actions are motivated primarily by my subconscious, equally clearly to me many of my other beliefs and actions are motivated primarily by my conscious, and most is in-between. I recognize that my love for my family or the Pittsburgh Steelers is heavily rooted in my subconscious mind; but I also find it much more likely that my slight preference for Bill versus Hillary Clinton has a lot more to do with my conscious. Similarly, I believe that evolutionary psychology can tell us a lot about why we prefer candy to broccoli, but tells us little about why we may prefer Coke to Pepsi.

More fundamentally, I think the point here is that at some level all of us have an obligation to use our critical thinking and common sense to determine whether given research makes sense and whether it can support the conclusions that some will want to attribute to it. I have recently commented on some of the problems that behavioral law & economics has run into, for instance, by failing to meet this test. And given that funding for university research is a scarce economic good, and that we all support it with our tax dollars and tuition payments, it behooves us to direct societal resources to useful research rather than the opposite. Indeed, there are American university faculty who are still blieve in a Marxian "scientific" view of history, who will insist that all of our views are shaped at a subconscious level by class bias and that there is a scientific unfolding of history and will be happy to provide you with "evidence" of both. Prior to that, social Darwinists purported to demonstrate that Darwinian evolution described and justified a particular social order. Do you have to be an expert to reject the hypothesis that there is a Marxian science to history or social Darwinism? Do I have to be an expert in the "science" of horoscope reading in order to reject the proposition that "the stars" are in control of my life? I think not. I think that the lesson is that we should draw as citizens and taxpayers is that we all would have all been better off if we had had raised questions about these arguments and their limits from the outset, rather than tenuring these theorists and inviting them to teach their theories to generations of college undergraduates.

So the bottom line is that I encourage each of you to visit the Project Implicit web site and take the test and make up your own mind. As "In the Agora" states commenting on my original post, "My point ... is to highlight how important it is to cast a discerning eye on everything you find in the news, even if it comes from professors working under the auspices of 'academic research.'" I couldn't say it better.