While responding to a comment in the Why Not Vote Libertarian? post, I realized that I probably didn’t make my reasoning clear enough in that post and thought I’d clarify by posting Daryl’s comment and my response here:

Count me as another (small “L”) libertarian who is going to vote for Kerry. My rationale? Divided government. Gridlock seems to work best by working least. And, since it’s almost a foregone conclusion that the GOP will retain one or both houses in Congress, the only hope for divided government is Kerry.

—

Daryl,

I agree that gridlock is a valid reason to prefer Kerry. With a Republican congress he, like Clinton, will probably get little of his preferred economic agenda passed; and the actual outcome won’t be too bad.

However, I think there are other, more compelling, reasons to prefer Bush (War on Terror, tax policy, Court nominations, etc.).

But, my main point is that it isn’t a logical or ethical necessity to vote for the outcome you prefer. Wanting an outcome and voting are different things. You might want to express your preferred outcome with your vote, but you don’t have to. I don’t feel a need to do that.

You shouldn’t really expect your vote to determine the election, so you should think hard about what you do want your vote to do. What kind of expression do you think justifies the effort of casting a vote? I think expressing my preference for libertarianism is a better use of my vote than expressing which of the major candidates I hope will win.

My preferred outcome of the election is that Bush barely wins, but loses (and wins) several states by a smaller margin than the number of libertarian votes. That might encourage both parties to take libertarian positions more seriously. I think that libertarians splitting their votes between Bush and Kerry will do nothing to help move this country toward libertarianism.

Your Mileage May Vary.

Steven Den Beste has an interesting post comparing the influences of Muqtada al-Sadr, and Michael Moore.

One amusing speculation (which I’ve heard a few times recently) is this:

If one was particularly cynical, one might entertain the suspicion that Moore secretly hates the left, and is laughing twice as hard. Not only is he getting filthy rich off them, and laughing all the way to his bank, he’s also helping to engineer their marginalization, and laughing all the way to their political destruction.

I don’t think that Moore is that clever. But, if he were, that’s just the impression he’d want me to have of him…

James Lileks seems to have finished reading this book, and decided to fisk this
contemptible article that Michael Moore wrote for the LA Times on July 4.

Enjoy it.

I hope that once we have serious Artificial Intelligence, Lileks will be able to license a product that will add an optional Lileks-Fisking commentary to everything we read, watch, and hear.

I’d buy it.

Jacob Levy has posted on the Volokh Conspiracy about why he intends to vote for John Kerry, rather than following his former custom of voting Libertarian.

Levy is a sharp guy and I respect his opinions very much. I also agree with him about the shortcomings of Bush and the looniness of Badnarik (the Libertarian candidate).

However, I think he’s overreacting to his distate for Bush’s failings by imagining that a Kerry administration would do better on either domestic or foreign issues. I’m incredibly skeptical of that.

I also don’t accept his rationale for not voting Libertarian. As I’ve said before, we shouldn’t vote because we expect to decide the election. We should vote to express what we’re for. And, despite Badnarik’s confusion about the war (and many other things), I think that it’s generally the case that Levy would prefer that policies move more toward the libertarian position; and that’s what I think a Libertarian vote expresses more than anything else.

The Kantian position that he expresses about willing the universalization of his vote just doesn’t make sense to me. But, if he enjoys expressing that idea, then I suppose it makes sense for him to vote that way.

I’m still voting Libertarian.

I just want to wish everybody a happy Fourth of July.

May the principles of the Declaration, and the human liberty they inspire, continue to flourish.

If you bought a love potion to cure your problem of being “A flop with chicks”, would you expect it to make you more attractive to women, or would you expect it to make everything seem attractive to you? I would expect the former, but the “love potion” in the song did the latter (and had predictably bad results).

I know. I expect too much logical consistency from songs. But does this
make any sense?

I still think the song is nice to listen to.

Conservatives from Dick Armey’s Citizen’s for a Sound Economy are pitching in to help get Ralph Nader on the ballot.

The weirdest part is that it makes sense.

We have a new tradition at my house.

This year, we (well, ok, I) decided to order 1776 from Netflix in anticipation of the Fourth of July (I should have tweaked the queue to make it arrive a little closer to the Fourth).

It’s a musical about the buildup to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I think it tried hard to be historically accurate in many respects. William Daniels does a great job as John Adams. And the songs are quite good. Some are funny (I especially like the one where they choose who will actually write the Declaration) and some are poignant.

All in all, I think it’s a great way to remember what the Fourth of July celebration is about, and I think we’ll be doing it again each year (until we get sick of it).

There’s still time for you to see it before the Fourth. I recommend it.

Google has a well-earned reputation for returning high-quality search results quickly.

But, it seems like they may not have been fast enough between their announcement and general delivery of their GMail email service. The big draw was that they would boost the maximum capacity to 1 GB of space, while others were only offering 2-4 MB of space for free accounts.

Unfortunately for Google, it seems that they have given the competition time to react before the GMail beta test is complete. Yahoo already announced an increase to 100MB which will be sufficient to keep most of their customers from making the effort to switch to a new system.

And, now, it seems that Microsoft is announcing that the Hotmail capacity will be increased to 250MB for free accounts starting this July, and 2GB for premium accounts. I suspect that the vast majority of Hotmail users will continue to stay with Hotmail rather than go through the trouble of switching their addresses, and learning a new system.

GMail has some cool features and a nice, clean, interface. But Hotmail has some advantageous features too. But, most importantly, they have an established base of users who need to have a good reason to switch.

I think that Google underestimated Microsoft’s agility. They’re not the first to make that mistake, and probably won’t be the last.

GMail will have to try harder to add sufficient value with their service to lure customers away. I look forward to their attempts, because the competition will be good for all of us.

In fact, it already has been good for us.

One of my excuses for not posting very frequently lately is that I had been studying for a Microsoft certification exam that I took on Thursday (I passed!). I had earned an MCSE about six years ago (back when the current SQL Server version was 6.5, and Windows Server was NT 4.0) but it has since expired, and I figured that it was time to renew my certification to prove to potential employers that I have current knowledge and that my brain still works.

So, I’ve been thinking about tests and testing recently.

I had a junior high school geometry teacher who was otherwise very forgettable, but I remember that one day she sympathized with some students’ complaints about certain tests not reflecting their knowledge and she said that: “All a test can measure is how well you took that test.”

I liked that.

The Microsoft test was of the type where a fairly elaborate scenario would be described, a problem situation posed, and then a set of potential solutions offered. The test taker was supposed to choose the “best” answer (or sometimes all applicable answers). Often there was an unambiguously best choice (in my opinion), but at other times there were several reasonable choices and I thought it was at least controversial to call one of them “best”. I found that I was often trying to psycho-analyze the test writer; looking for clues in the scenario description for what he might have wanted to emphasize. Now, psycho-analyzing test writers from their questions might be a useful
skill, but it was not a skill that the test purported to measure.

Another problem I have with testing is that the tests are often closed-book, time pressured experiences. People with good memories and who are fast readers and decision-makers do better than others. But, in the real world (especially in modern technical fields) it’s unrealistic to expect people to remember all the facts they need or to come to a conclusion in a matter of seconds. The skill you should really be looking for is the ability to solve a problem with all of the resources available in a typical work environment, and in a reasonable length of time (not a matter of seconds). But, such testing would be more difficult to control. So, we end up measuring an approximation of the desired skills because measuring the actually desired skills is too
difficult. (Which reminds me of an I Love Lucy episode in which Lucy claimed to be looking for an item that she lost in another room “Because the light’s better here.”)

I don’t have a real solution to any of this.

I understand that it can be important to get an idea of a person’s skills. And, also, that it’s helpful for the individual to learn about which areas he could focus on to improve. And, imperfect testing is better for these things than no information at all.

But, I guess I hope that people are aware that test scores do not necessarily accurately reflect a person’s knowledge and capabilities. And, I hope that we can come up with better ways of judging these things in the future.