Your defence of the Oxford comma sucks

The Oxford comma, also known as the serial comma, is the comma before the last item of a list. Some people usually put it in; some people usually leave it out. It’s the comma that appears in the first but not the second of these:

Tom, Dick, and Harry.

Tom, Dick and Harry.

I usually leave it out. When I was a little boy being taught how to use commas, I was taught the style that leaves it out. I got into the habit before I knew there was an alternative, and I haven’t seen a good reason to change. I’ve changed other writing habits I was taught as a child; for example, I was taught to type two spaces after a full stop, and to write “realise” and “jeopardise” instead of “realize” and “jeopardize”. Now I put one space after a full stop and write “realize” and “jeopardize”. I won’t bore you with the reasons for these changes, though if you’re keen then there are people to bore you with them here and here. Some people think there are also good reasons to buy into the Oxford comma. Their reasons are silly.

The standard Oxonian argument rests on the ambiguity of phrases like the following:

I’d like to thank my parents, Marilyn Monroe and God.

We invited the lion tamers, Stalin and Nelson Mandela.

These phrases are ambiguous between their intended readings and ones that imply that Marilyn Monroe and God are the speaker’s parents and that Stalin and Nelson Mandela are the lion tamers. The Oxford comma would remove this ambiguity. The argument doesn’t work, for four reasons.

First, the examples are made up. If you want to show that not using the Oxford comma causes problems, the best evidence would be instances of it causing problems. If people never used the anti-Oxonian style, the use of hypothetical examples would be understandable. But lots of people use that style, and if it’s a problem then their use should supply evidence of this.

Second, the examples are not ambiguous in context. We all know that context usually removes ambiguity, and context includes common knowledge among speakers and listeners. It also includes expectations about the sort of thing people are likely to be saying. We know that Marilyn Monroe and God are not your parents and you wouldn’t say they were, and this removes the ambiguity. Ambiguous examples would be ones like these:

I’d like to thank my parents, Steve and Michelle.

We invited the lion tamers, Steve and Michelle.

But those examples aren’t the ones people use to defend the Oxford comma, and that’s another reason their defence of it sucks.

Third, the fact that using the Oxford comma would sometimes remove an ambiguity does not mean you have to use it all the time. It is quite normal to use optional extra commas or other punctuation when leaving them out would make for problematic ambiguity. Every sensible writer does this, unless their punctuation style is already maximally comma-heavy and so there are no optional extra commas to add. It’d probably be sensible to use an Oxford comma in the examples above about Steve and Michelle, or to rephrase them if you intended the other readings. But the argument that you should always use the Oxford comma because sometimes it resolves ambiguity and you should punctuate all your lists the same way would lead to a maximally comma-heavy style in general, and nobody wants that. (Well, maybe the New Yorker wants that, but nobody else does. I’m a big fan of the New Yorker, but I disagree with their style guru Mary Norris about almost everything.) And even if you’re willing to bite the maximally comma-heavy bullet, it won’t do any good. When lists contain items which themselves include commas, you eventually have to start separating them with semi-colons or the writing will be incomprehensible. Not even the New Yorker advocates separating all items in all lists with semi-colons, just to maintain consistency with a practice that is occasionally necessary.

Fourthly, all the made-up examples can be easily changed into ammunition against the Oxford comma.

I’d like to thank my parents, Marilyn Monroe and God.

I’d like to thank my mother, Marilyn Monroe, and God.

We invited the lion tamers, Stalin and Nelson Mandela.

We invited a lion tamer, Stalin, and Nelson Mandela.

Here’s an example of this ambiguity occurring in the wild:

Cocksure certainties

I was reading an opinion piece in the Observer by Nick Cohen yesterday, and I came across this paragraph:

As the opposition collapsed last week, Paul Mason insisted that Labour must be transformed from a party that seeks to govern into a “social movement”. Mason, along with Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and Milne, is part of a group of journalists who have poisoned public life by taking braggart swagger and cocksure certainties of newspaper punditry into politics. But in this instance, he was authentically reflecting “the people” or, rather, that tiny section of “the people” who pay £3 and click on a link to show they agree with him.

My first thought was that it was strange for a political newspaper pundit to talk about political newspaper punditry in such uncharitable terms. It might be fair enough for a reality TV star to criticize Donald Trump for poisoning public life by taking the cartoonish offensiveness and fakery of reality TV into politics, but this seems different. Political newspaper punditry seems too similar to public life for braggart swagger and cocksure certainties to be OK in one but not in the other. Perhaps you’ll disagree with me about that. But there’s something else I wanted to pick up on in the paragraph. It’s the cocksure certainty expressed with such braggart swagger in the last sentence. I think it might not be quite accurate.

Here are the results of the leadership election Jeremy Corbyn won last year:

You’ll notice that Corbyn did much better than any of the other candidates among members, and among registered supporters, and among affiliated supporters. From what Cohen said, you’d think that Corbyn won the election because of the votes of the people who had paid £3 to be able to vote in the leadership election. Those people are the “registered supporters” column. But if Corbyn is winning in all the columns, then what Cohen said is quite misleading. Unless I’ve misread something.

I don’t know if he really thinks Corbyn won the election on the back of the £3 voters. It seems a weird thing for him to be wrong about. But since people are discussing Corbyn’s leadership a lot at the moment, it’s worth getting this right. When Corbyn was elected, the big split wasn’t between the party and the clicktivists. It was between the party membership, the clicktivists and the members of affiliated organizations on the one hand, and the Labour MPs on the other. Maybe the split is in a different place now, but that’s where it was last year.

Now, I understand that Nick Cohen thinks that the platform that most Labour MPs want the Labour party to present is closer to the views of the electorate as a whole than Corbyn's platform is. That's a genuine concern. But it's very different from the idea that Labour's leadership is out of touch because the election was hijacked by a group of fairweather enthusiasts with £3 to spare. If Labour is out of touch with the people, then it's out of touch at every level but the MPs. (The MPs may of course be out of touch as well. We don't really know a great deal about the people's view on Angela Eagle, Owen Smith, or whoever the Parliamentary Labour Party wants to replace Corbyn with.)

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I did try asking him on Twitter whether he thinks that Corbyn only won because of the £3 voters, but he didn’t reply. That’s completely understandable: he’s famous and I’m sure people tweet at him all the time. Here’s the tweet:

Negotiating styles

In Britain, where I live, we’ve been having a bit of a political crisis over the last week and a half. We went and voted to leave the European Union, and now we have to decide how exactly that’s going to work. One of the things we have to decide is what’s going to happen to all the citizens of other EU countries who live in Britain at the moment. As Britain is an EU country too, they’re currently allowed to live here. Once we leave, they won’t automatically be allowed.

Now, we could just let them stay, if we wanted to, but we haven’t committed to that yet. Apparently when we’re negotiating our new relationship with the EU, deporting them will be on the table. And you might think that’s just good sense - the other EU members will want to look out for their citizens’ interests, and that means negotiating an arrangement on which they won’t have their lives turned upside down by being deported. Committing ourselves now would reduce our negotiating power.

But don’t we want them to stay? They contribute to life here, and deportation is awful, so kicking them out would be lose-lose. These people are our friends and neighbours, and deporting people is neither friendly nor neighbourly. But the possibility that we don’t want them to stay shouldn’t be ruled out. The person making this decision is quite likely to be Theresa May, and gratuitously deporting people is one of her hobbies. And then there are all the people in Britain who just don’t like immigrants. Without those people we never would have voted to leave the EU in the first place. So maybe that’s what’s going on.

But perhaps we really do want them to stay, but we’re pretending to be willing to do mass deportations as part of a negotiating strategy. If the other EU members don’t call our bluff, we might get some concessions out of them. It’s like threatening to walk away from the table. You don’t want to walk away from the table, but if the other side thinks you might do it anyway then you have more bargaining power.

This isn’t like walking away from the table, though. What happens if you don’t come to a deal? You do what you can to get what you wanted by yourself. And since we don’t need EU members’ co-operation to let their citizens stay here, in the absence of a deal we would just let them stay, if that’s what we wanted. Threatening to deport them, even though we don’t want to, is therefore not like threatening to walk away from the table. So what is it like?

It’s like threatening to kill hostages. People don’t tend to particularly want to kill their hostages, but they threaten to do it because they think people won’t dare call their bluff. This negotiating tactic can work, of course, both in real hostage situations and in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma of international diplomacy. But however effective it is, it’s not the negotiating tactic of civilized businesspeople. It’s the negotiating tactic of Bond villains, and I don’t want people negotiating on my behalf to use it.

I really don't understand the oil industry

When I was at school, between 1988 and 2002, they used to teach us that the world had about 30 years of oil left. It didn’t matter that the geography textbooks were ten or fifteen years old, because the thirty year estimate stayed pretty constant from one decade to the next. As I understand it, these estimates were based on how long it would take to use up currently proven reserves if current trends in usage stayed constant. Since more reserves got proven all the time, the time limit didn’t necessarily go down as oil got used up. The cynic in me suspects they deliberately went for a methodology that produced an alarmingly low figure because they wanted us to become enthusiastic about renewable energy. Perhaps it worked, although when you think about it the low figure is as much a reason to drill more holes in Alaska looking for oil as to make solar panels more efficient.

Regardless of where the figure came from and why it was pushed on children, the point was definitely that one day this stuff is going to run out. And nowadays we don’t think that’s true. If we burn all the oil we know about, then either we’ll need carbon capture technologies we don’t have yet, or climate change will make life as we know it impossible. We won’t let that happen, will we? Call me a wild-eyed optimist, but I don’t think we will. The key constraint on how much oil we’ll use is not how much of it there is. It’s how much we can use without ruining the climate.

Now, you might think this would have big economic consequences for the oil industry, and so it will. But we’re not seeing all the consequences you might naively expect. People are still looking for more oil, even though we don’t need any more oil. And you might expect that we wouldn’t bother getting oil from hard-to-get-at places anymore. There’s no point extracting oil expensively from Canada when there’s stuff just under the surface in Kuwait that’ll be left in the ground for the sake of the climate. (And it’s much more expensive to extract oil from Canada than from Kuwait. Like, more than four times as expensive.) If the international oil industry was centrally planned, the plan would be to use up the stuff that’s easiest to get at and leave the stuff that’s hard to get at in the ground. We certainly wouldn’t be blowing our carbon budget on shale gas that can’t be extracted without causing earthquakes in Oklahoma. Of course the international oil industry isn’t centrally planned, but market forces are supposed to be even more efficient than central planning, so they should be able to do at least as well as a central plan would. But they’re not. I don’t get it.

The good news is that something along these lines may finally be starting to happen. Apparently it’s surprising that oil prices are low and Saudi Arabia hasn’t slowed down its production, and Ben Walsh in the Huffington Post thinks it might be because they’d rather sell it now for $30 a barrel than leave it in the ground and then find that in fifteen years everyone’s got their own solar panels. What I don’t really get is that the tone of the article is more “hey, maybe this is what’s happening”, rather than “finally, this obviously massively overdue thing is happening”. I can only conclude that it isn’t actually overdue, and my whole understanding of the situation is wrongheaded. If you do understand it, enlighten me in the comments!

The Easter Bunny

Rabbits don’t lay eggs. Normally there would be no reason to point this out, but today is Easter, and one strand of Easter folklore has it that there’s a close connection between Easter eggs and the Easter Bunny. The Easter Bunny is a rabbit.* Now, it’s not clear whether the Easter Bunny actually produces the eggs itself or just hides them, the way Father Christmas has elves to make his toys while he focuses more on distribution. But even if the Easter Bunny delegates the manufacturing side of the operation, the eggs have to come from somewhere. Where do they come from? Not the Easter Bunny’s reproductive system, that’s for sure.

Many animals do lay eggs, principally birds and reptiles. I guess the reason we’ve settled on a rabbit rather than a bird or reptile is that reptiles aren’t cuddly enough and birds aren’t seen as having enough personality. But there’s one animal that is as cuddly and as spunky as a rabbit and also lays eggs. That animal is the duck-billed platypus.

Too spiky to cuddle? The western long-beaked echidna lays eggs too, but

its spikes make it an unlikely symbol of vernal good cheer.

The only explanation I can think of for our continued belief that Easter eggs come from the Easter Bunny rather than the Easter Platypus is that people have seen the Easter Bunny hiding the eggs, and it definitely wasn’t a platypus. It’s easy to tell them apart, after all, because of the bill. But this doesn’t rule out the hypothesis that the Easter Bunny hides eggs which are produced by a hardworking team of Easter Platypodes. And when you think about it, no other explanation really makes sense.

*Some people will tell you that the Easter Bunny is, or was, a hare. I find this implausible. Like Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny has a lot of work to do, and hares are notoriously lazy. In addition to the fable of the tortoise and the hare, we also have evidence from comparing the living arrangements of rabbits and hares. While rabbits put a lot of work into digging burrows and warrens, hares just find a slightly indented patch of ground and then kind of lounge around on it. They call this non-construction a form, but they’re basically just lying on the ground. Lazy. And hares don’t lay eggs either, so the point is moot to the present discussion anyway.

Bullshit, philosophy and regulatory capture

The Dunning-Kruger effect is great fun, because it gives you scientific respectability when you tell someone they’re so stupid they don’t even know they’re stupid. It’s a brave person who’ll double down in the face of such an accusation. Besides being fun, the effect is probably real, and it’s not really mysterious. The idea is that the ability to do something well often overlaps a lot with the ability to tell whether it’s done well. So people who are very bad at something will also often be bad at telling how good they are, and so will be prone to erroneously believing themselves to be experts. According to Wikipedia the effect was first tested by David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999, and as with so many simple ideas one wonders what took us so long. Perhaps skill in coming up with seemingly obvious ideas overlaps with skill in discerning in retrospect how obvious those ideas really were.

The Dunning-Kruger effect doesn’t apply to everything, of course. In some areas, ability to perform well doesn’t overlap much with ability to discern good performance. You don’t have to be able to run fast to use a stopwatch, and (to give a less clear cut example) great football managers were often fairly ordinary players. But one kind of area where the effect is very likely to arise is academia. One area of academia is philosophy. And people with no expertise in philosophy do love trash-talking philosophy. A particularly embarrassing recent case is Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Philosophy is probably a friendlier environment for bullshit than many other areas of academia, because it’s not very testable. Now, some of it is a bit testable. Karl Marx was a philosopher, and it’s probably fair to say that his ideas had undergone a lot more testing by the end of the 20th century than they had at the start, and that the history of the 20th century should inform the discussion of his ideas. Philosophical arguments that human cognitive faculties are located in the heart rather than the brain have been empirically refuted even more decisively. We probably have some empirical evidence that matter is composed of indivisible particles which wasn’t available when the ancient atomists first proposed the idea. But some philosophy seems not to be testable at all. David Chalmers is a philosopher, and he argues that philosophical zombies are possible, which means that there could have been creatures physically identical to humans but lacking any consciousness. How do you test that? Maybe you can. But it’s at least not obvious that we’ve gathered any empirical evidence that bears on the question at all. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that rocket science helped put twelve men on the moon, and you don’t have to be a political philosopher to see that communism didn’t pan out quite the way some people expected. But the only way to assess whether the people talking about philosophical zombies are on to anything is to understand the methodology and the arguments, and once you’re at that point you’re already pretty good at doing philosophy yourself. You can’t tell if philosophy is a problem without becoming part of the problem.

One variant on the age-old “who watches the watchers” problem is called regulatory capture. Part of the problem is that it’s in an industry’s interests to gain control of whatever government body is charged with regulating it. But another part is just that competent regulators will be drawn from the same profession they’re regulating. They know each other, they like each other, they share assumptions, and these conflicts of interest can lead to the regulation not being done properly. It didn’t have to be this way. You could have parallel institutions which train and employ regulators, the way different countries train their armed forces largely independently, and the instituitions and personnel of law enforcement and organized crime are mostly separate. But it’s expensive, and it’s not usually what happens. Regulatory bodies hire people from the industries they regulate. And there just isn’t a group of people who have the expertise to call bullshit on philosophy but aren’t heavily associated with and invested in the discipline. Bill Nye isn’t competent to call out our bullshit, but the people who are competent aren’t impartial enough. The inevitable conclusion is that philosophy is doomed to raise sceptical eyebrows forever. It could all be bullshit and nobody would ever know.

But this conclusion is not inevitable. Philosophy does in fact take very seriously the idea that large parts of itself are bullshit, or meaningless, or obvious, or obviously false, or completely unimportant. One reason it does this is that it’s the sort of issue philosophers are interested in, another is that these kinds of critique sometimes follow from other philosophical positions, and a third plausible reason is that philosophy attracts disingenuously self-deprecating navel-gazers. If the watchers are self-involved enough they will watch each other, especially once they have tenure.

Another aspect of philosophy’s tendency to call bullshit on itself is less inspiring, however. It smacks of tribalism, the Dunning-Kruger effect, and a general Anglo-Saxon distrust of all things French. There’s a tendency for analytic philosophers, at least in English-speaking countries, to think that all that stuff that goes on in continental European philosophy departments is a load of garbage. But we’re not competent to judge. Maybe they hear us calling Derrida a charlatan and think “how do they know?”, but maybe they react to it the way we react to Bill Nye. And I think that if they reacted the second way they’d usually be absolutely right. We don’t know what we’re talking about. But they do, and I hope they’re self-involved enough to take the possibility that their whole field is a load of garbage seriously.

Why Trump's opponents endorse him over Clinton

I’ve been following the US Presidential primaries fairly closely, partly because it’s important and partly because a lot of the coverage comes in the form of comedy monologues from late night shows I can watch on Youtube. I haven’t contributed much to the coverage myself, and up to now it’s been getting by fine without me. But now I think I may have thought of something new to say about it. I've seen some people wondering why Cruz, Kasich and Rubio still say they’ll endorse Trump if he wins the nomination, and I think I know the answer.

Here are four possible explanations which I don't think are right. First, they actually think Trump would be a better President than Hillary Clinton. It’s hard to get into the head of someone who thinks that, but these aren’t especially normal people we’re talking about, so maybe that’s what’s going on. A second possible reason is that they said they would support whoever was nominated. Politicians don’t like to be seen to break their promises, and maybe they don’t want to be seen to break this one, at least not while they’re still running for President. A third alternative is that they respect the democratic processes of their party. Cruz, Kasich and Rubio are all members of the Republican party, and might be presumed to have some party loyalty, and that includes loyalty to the primary voters. If the voters endorse Trump, they’ll endorse Trump out of loyalty to the voters. Fourth, they may be concerned that Republican primary voters think Trump would be a better President than Hillary Clinton. Lots of these people are actually voting for Trump, after all, and they made up their minds a long time ago that Clinton would be a terrible President. Maybe the candidates think that endorsing Clinton over Trump would turn voters off.

I don’t think any of these are especially implausible, but they’re not very clear-cut. You can imagine the candidates or their campaign strategists thinking quite hard about the decision, analysing polls and asking themselves fundamental questions about who they really are as politicians, and they could end up going either way. Three fairly different candidates in fairly different situations have all considered the question and all come up with the same answer: say they’ll endorse Trump if he wins. One exaplanation for the consensus is that the question is in fact a no-brainer. And I think it is.

Trump agreed he would endorse the eventual nominee and not run as a third-party candidate as long as the party was fair to him. Cruz, Kasich and Rubio all just pledged their loyalty without the fairness caveat. If Cruz says that actually he won’t endorse the eventual nominee if it’s Trump, and then Cruz wins the nomination, the agreement with Trump will clearly be broken, and not by Trump. Trump would be free to run as a third-party candidate, and why wouldn’t he? He’s rich, he’s having the time of his life, and he might even think he could win. So Trump runs, he and Cruz split the rightwing vote and Clinton wins in a landslide. In short, Cruz, Kasich and Rubio are sticking to their agreement because not doing so would doom any chance they have of winning the Presidency.

Of course, this reason for endorsing Trump over Clinton disappears when a candidate drops out of the race or if Trump actually wins the nomination. It’s unlikely he’s going to stop giving Republicans pretexts for saying that this time he’s gone too far and even Clinton would be better. It’ll be interesting to see if they’re still endorsing him in November.