KNOWLEDGE & BELIEF...

...IT'S ALL PROVISIONAL

If you'd care to drive yourself nuts someday, ponder the difference between knowledge and belief.

I believe, or at least I've been taught to believe, that Newton's law of gravity requires all apples to fall down, absent some other force like a hurricane.

I'm fully prepared to believe, however, that there's an exception to the rule on the first occasion that I see an apple fall up, without the high wind, of course.

Einstein came up with not so much an exception as a reformulation of Newton's gravity law by postulating a space-time continuum in which apple-falling was a special case, part of a larger system.  Apples needn't fall up for Newton's theory to be wrong, but the theory, or law, if you like, is limited to the here and now in orchards on terra firma.

So, do I know that Newton's law of gravity is right, or wrong (or Einstein's), or is this simply something that I believe?

Do the people who believe in God know that God exists, or is this simply something they believe, despite evidence that a reasonable person would find persuasive?

If I believe in something strongly enough that I say that I know it is true, is this evidence of my good sense or something far more sinister?

For example, if I say that I believe in my horoscope, the one in the newspaper any day of the week, or that I believe in my lucky stars, because sometimes the alleged predictions seem consistent with another belief that I happen to hold, that this is my lucky day, for instance, am I nuts, or what?

The reason this comes up is because of an interesting quote in Adam Liptak's "Sidebar" column in today's New York Times, reprinted below.

Maybe it's the mark of an insane person that you're absolutely convinced you're right.

- Carlton F. W. Larson, a law professor at the University of California, Davis

Is that a legitimate definition of insanity?

It certainly seems correct to apply it in some cases.

Insane people, by definition those having a significant break with reality, meaning that no amount of reason will persuade them that they're wrong, live in an alternate reality.  There's no sense arguing with them, or showing them proof that they're wrong, for they'll assume that your proof is counterfeit and that you are the agent of malevolent forces seeking to undermine their world, which you are.

Why don't we institutionalize people who believe in astrology?

God?

Democracy?

You know, those people willing to start a war for their ideology as though theirs was the only way to live.

No one that we know, of course.  Forget Iraq.

The view that I hold is that all of my beliefs, except do unto others, is up for grabs.  Justice Holmes famously observed that many a man's fighting faith has gone by the boards.  The system of Soviet communism has collapsed.  Red China has abandoned the Red and is now flourishing, having thrown off their chains.

Monarchists are laughed at by republicans, and vice versa.

The operative principle, unless and until a better one comes along, is that all knowledge is provisional; all belief is provisional.

I'll tell you where this is not applied, legally, and is enforced for all it's worth, and more.  A criminal conviction is one of our most seriously guarded acts of belief.  Let's say you are accused of a crime that you did not commit; don't laugh, it could happen to you.  See all the domestic violence incidents, and claims of child sexual abuse, where some of those accused have been accused falsely.  I won't mention false accusations of rape and murder because you know that couldn't happen to you of someone you love.  Dream on.  Your belief has outrun your reason.  Of courst it could happen to you.  No one expected the World Trade Center to collapse either.  The FDNY was sure it couldn't, in light of the non-collapse in the 1993 truck bombing in the garage.  FDNY stood corrected in 2001.

Why are criminal convictions so jealously guarded?

Perhaps because they are so hard bought.  A police department and prosecutor's office invested time, money, and energy to obtain that conviction over opposition.  The last thing it wants to be told is that the bad person they'd worked so hard to put away is not a bad person.  Once a bad person, always a bad person.  The victim is still dead.  The participants in obtaining the conviction move on, becoming supervisors and judges.  The last thing any of these folks want is to see their work deemed wrong.  So they fight to uphold it.

Sometimes the jury verdict is based on sufficient evidence as to inspire the view that it is based on knowledge of the facts, and sometimes merely only that it is based on belief.

Which is the higher standard?  Knowledge, of course.

Which is the legal standard?  Belief.  All a jury needs to do in order to convict is to persuade itself, or be persuaded, to the point where it can say that it "believes beyond a reasonable doubt" that the accusation is true as stated.  That's what the jurors did in Salem, 1692, in voting to convict so many women, who were hanged as witches.  The only problem was that there were no real witches.  The whole town believed in witches, however. 

The Newton's law of Salem was that there were devils and witches.  It took an Einstein to put the matter in a broader context.  What if the Devil, clever fellow that he was, made the witchcraft victims, the young girls, point out as culprits not the Devil's real henchmen, but innocent neighbors who would take the fall instead?  This re-theorizing is called "paradoxical intervention," incidentally.

If the world seems a bit of a magic show, that's because it is.

When you watch a performance by magicians, or illusionists, as they style themselves, you realize, don't you, that there's been a lot of preparation in setting up the arrangements by which to fool you, from misdirection to plants in the audience, pre-screening of volunteers from the audience, etc.  And so you are taken.  The "willing suspension of disbelief," this has been termed.  You enter daring the magician to fool you, at some level wanting him to try to fool you.  And you are fooled, if only because the hand is quicker than the eye.

Richard Feynman took delight in debunking people who tried to fool him, or worse, themselves.  He liked to figure out and explain how they did it.  He was unusually good at figuring out the difference between real and make believe, especially in science, where fooling yourself is the big bugbear.

We love to fool ourselves.

I think I'll pray to God that I no longer fool myself. 

Care to join?

Amen.

       

---

January 15, 2008

Sidebar

A Hereditary Perk the Founding Fathers Failed to Anticipate

 

By ADAM LIPTAK

   

Legacy preferences in college admissions — the nepotistic advantages given to the children of alumni — are indefensible, of course.

President Bush, who should know, has called for their abolition. John Edwards has written that they are “something out of an aristocracy, not our democracy.”

The usual justification for legacy preferences is candidly cynical: they generate contributions from alumni. That crass bargain seems a poor substitute for the usual considerations in admissions decisions, like merit and diversity. But private universities are certainly entitled to trade money for principle.

Public universities, which are part of state and city governments, may be another matter. Why in the world should the government be allowed to discriminate based on heredity?

Legacy preferences are, “quite literally, educational grandfather clauses,” Akhil Reed Amar and Neal Kumar Katyal wrote in the U.C.L.A. Law Review in 1996, referring to laws used to disenfranchise black voters in the South after the Civil War. Grandfather clauses imposed voting requirements like literacy tests on new voters but exempted people whose ancestors had voted. Those people happened all to be white.

Similarly, being eligible for a legacy preference at most universities “is a near-perfect proxy for being white,” said Michael A. Olivas, a law professor and authority on higher education at the University of Houston.

In 2002, for instance, Texas A&M University admitted 321 whites and 3 blacks who would not have gotten in otherwise because they were legacies, according to data the university provided to The Houston Chronicle in 2004. The university abolished the preferences not long after those numbers became public.

In “The Chosen,” his study of admissions at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, Jerome Karabel, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrated that preferences for the children of alumni were a relatively recent phenomenon, a result of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in the first part of the last century. The preferences spread to public universities even more recently.

It could cost public universities real money to give up the preferences. Alumni give more than $8 billion annually to public and private colleges and universities.

And they are not giving only out of nostalgia and altruism, as Jonathan Meer and Harvey S. Rosen, both economists, demonstrated in a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. The paper analyzed alumni contributions at a selective research university it did not name.

Some conclusions: People with children gave more. Giving increased as the children of alumni who applied to the university neared 18. Giving dropped off after the admissions decision, and the decline was far greater when the child was rejected.

The conventional view is that legacy preferences are perfectly lawful. In his dissent from the Supreme Court decision upholding the affirmative action plan at the University of Michigan’s law school in 2003, for instance, Justice Clarence Thomas said the Constitution’s equal protection clause did not prohibit “unseemly legacy preferences” because they did not directly involve race.

“So while legacy preferences can stand under the Constitution,” Justice Thomas wrote, “racial discrimination cannot.”

He added a footnote tweaking some supporters of affirmative action. “Were this court to have the courage to forbid the use of racial discrimination in admissions,” Justice Thomas wrote, “legacy preferences (and similar practices) might quickly become less popular — a possibility not lost, I am certain, on the elites (both individual and institutional) supporting the law school in this case.”

Only one decision has squarely addressed the constitutionality of legacy preferences. In 1976, a federal judge in Durham, N.C., ruled that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was free to favor the children of alumni.

The preferences did not violate the Constitution, the judge, Hiram H. Ward ruled, because there was a rational reason for them — they generated “monetary support for the university.” Requiring the university to provide anything more than a rational reason was not necessary, Judge Ward said, because neither race nor fundamental rights were directly implicated.

The bottom line, as Charles W. Collier put it in The Journal of Legal Education in 2005, is that the University of Michigan would be free to “transform itself into the Michigan University for Alumni Children Only without running afoul of the law in any way.”

But maybe there is another way to think about the issue. In a fascinating and provocative article published recently in the Washington University Law Review, Carlton F. W. Larson, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, argued that the Constitution prohibited legacy preferences at public universities through its nobility clauses.

Its what? The Constitution, in separate clauses, bars the federal government and the states from granting titles of nobility. The clauses have not been the subject of much litigation, but they do embody a principle the Constitution’s framers thought absolutely fundamental to the ideals of the American revolution.

“Legal distinctions, titles, powers and privileges,” John Adams wrote in 1788, “are not hereditary.”

Public universities, Professor Larson said in an interview, “have always been, much more than private universities, engines of upward mobility.” As a matter of policy, principle and constitutional law, he said, they should not be handing out benefits “based solely on ancestry.”

That may all be true, but it still seems a bit of a leap to move from prohibiting the government from naming me a duke to barring public universities from giving the children of alumni an admissions advantage.

But Professor Larson said he was “deadly serious” that the nobility clauses prohibited legacy preferences at public universities. “Maybe it’s the mark of an insane person,” he went on, “that you’re absolutely convinced you’re right.”

Online: Documents and an archive of Adam Liptak’s articles: nytimes.com/adamliptak.