Book Review: "The Drunkard's Walk" by Leonard Mlodinow

I've recently reread the book The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow, which is a book about many ways that probabilistic phenomena occur in daily life and what the consequences are for understanding individual & collective decisions. I say "reread" because the first time I read it was in high school (as I recall, although I don't remember exactly when, though I did mention it in a review for a different book, saying then that I didn't finish it because I didn't find it as engaging as the book in that review); a few days ago, I happened to see it on top a stack of books, and I figured it would be nice to reread for a few reasons. First, I have learned a lot of science, and my worldview has developed & matured a lot, since I was in high school, so I thought it would be good to see how this book would hold up in my view in that context. Second, I figured it would be nice to read a book about probabilistic phenomena, as it wasn't something that I had to worry much about in my college studies or in my PhD work (which is a little ironic, given that van der Waals forces and radiative heat transfer are phenomena of statistical thermodynamic fluctuations, but it turns out that certain mathematical formulations hide all essential randomness), it will be relevant to my postdoctoral work as I get more into travel surveys with associated statistical analysis, concepts like base rate fallacies are relevant for things like false positive result rates for tests associated with this coronavirus (please note that I am not a public health expert, and please consult governmental public health agencies for guidance with respect to this ongoing pandemic), and I've been thinking over the last several months about how many of the conceptual quandaries associated with quantum mechanics can actually be tied to questions of whether probability is emergent versus fundamental.

The book is not too long, and it is a quick & engaging read. The author uses many interesting examples to motivate the discussion of fallacious reasoning in the context of probability as well as ways that probability enters daily life even in areas where people expect more determinism. There are also many interesting historical anecdotes about the development of probability theory, especially how ancient Greece and certain medieval European societies believed that any discussion of uncertainty would go against their conceptions of a pure & deterministic universe (whatever the prime mover might be). Also, in the tenth chapter, there is an interesting discussion of how the development of chaos theory itself is an example of the unpredictable & seemingly random nature of human life (though I didn't like the conflation of chaos theory itself with probability, as chaos is a separate mathematical phenomena that can emerge in purely deterministic systems). Additionally, in the tenth chapter, I appreciated how the author is careful to state that determinism is a bad model only of human behavior (at individual & societal levels) and makes no claim about the applicability of determinism to the universe at large, and how the author makes a call for humility and for rewarding people based on their character instead of perpetuating beliefs that people who are successful are wholly responsible for their successes while people who are in marginalized circumstances are somehow rightfully being punished for past mistakes. Overall, I think the book does a good job of achieving its purpose of illustrating to lay readers how ubiquitous probabilistic phenomena are in even seemingly deterministic aspects of daily life.

Before getting into other criticisms, I should point out that my copy of this book has several printing errors (mostly missing words) and a few typographical errors, but these occurred maybe once every 10 pages (based on an instinctive guess), so these therefore didn't affect my understanding of the book. Also, the author errs in claiming that Germanic rule in the Dark Ages (commonly understood to be the medieval period) preceded the ancient Roman civilization, but this again doesn't undercut the overall argument.

Where this book falls short is in fulfilling its purpose of diving deeper into the implications of such randomness for human behavior at individual and societal levels; the author's sloppy treatment of human behavior is a recurring problem throughout the book. In particular, there are a few related broad issues that come up at various points through the book. The first is the question of how to reconcile the apparent randomness of daily events (including the phenomenon of regression to the mean) believed to be deterministic with the real phenomena of collective self-fulfilling prophecies (including emergent segregation of social groups to reinforce outcomes that are believed to be deterministic even if they are not, thereby reinforcing determinism in itself). The second is the treatment of things like superstitions as examples of self-fulfilling prophecies, even if the superstitions have no effects in their contents but may change mindsets enough to change outcomes. The author doesn't do a good job of addressing many of these issues throughout the book, and only partially acknowledges the power of self-fulfilling prophecies at the end of the book (in the tenth chapter); the author makes it seem like a slow & methodical build-up to a satisfying conclusion, but frankly, the discussion of these issues could have been a lot more clear & concise and could have come much sooner in the book. The discussion of superstition in particular is rife with condescension, as the author never acknowledges how superstitions may change mindsets & lead to self-fulfilling prophecies but instead summarily dismisses them as silly relics mostly of a bygone era, reinforced by statements about how science and religion were irreparably separated with the trial of Galileo with no nuanced discussion of how religious beliefs (even if not organized religious institutions per se, to the extent that was the case before Galileo) played a role in motivating scientific discoveries even after Galileo. Another example is how the author glibly dismisses many claims of clusters of environmentally-caused cancer; it may well be true that some cases are due to biased statistical analysis after the fact, but it doesn't really address why inequitable outcomes seem to occur so frequently in this context, and it doesn't do justice to the gravity of the problem. (UPDATE: I recognize that my argument against the author's treatment of the incidence of environmentally-caused cancer can easily be dismissed as an overly emotional reaction that is not justified by the statistics, so it is worth clarifying that further. My concern is that the statistical arguments that claim that environmentally-caused cancer is not really a problem, and that those who claim it is a problem only do so by drawing arbitrary boundaries after the fact to inflate apparent concentrations of carcinogens in specific areas, may themselves be riven with the same sorts of bias that are perpetuated in situations like machine learning determining the provision of health care, but are cast in a way that seems "neutral" and therefore "superior" to "emotionally-driven" arguments.) Furthermore, although there is discussion of both the failures of superficial statistical arguments in favor of DNA testing in the criminal justice system and of the way that Bayesian analysis can systematically codify learning of new information in terms of probabilities, there is little discussion of how these issues can combine in toxic ways to perpetuate existing societal biases under the veneer of formal Bayesian analysis (as occurs with machine learning now); I admit that I wouldn't have been thinking about this as much had I not read and reviewed the book Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil, but similar examples were already available at the time that the book that I review in this post was being written. I really see an essential condescension and a lack of humility throughout the book in these discussions of human behavior, masked by the pithy & irreverent writing, that are at odds with the author's own calls for humility & deeper understanding.

There are other aspects of human behavior that this book fails to adequately capture; these may technically be beyond the scope of this book, but I think they are worth noting anyway, as they speak to larger problems with the ability of people (even those well-trained in STEM fields) to really understand probability theory. The second chapter goes over many examples of how, in the technical language of probability, given events \( A \) and \( B \), certain questions can be framed such that laypeople and professional specialists (particularly doctors & lawyers) fall into the trap of believing that \( \operatorname{Pr}(A \cap B) > \operatorname{Pr}(A) \) even though the opposite is mathematically always true. However, I can already see that the phrasing of many of those questions, particularly the way that events \( A \) & \( B \) are juxtaposed (especially if \( B \) is additional information that may be relevant to the assessment of \( A \)), may make people believe either that what should be interpreted as \( \operatorname{Pr}(A) \) is actually \( \operatorname{Pr}(A \cap \neg B) \), in which case \( \operatorname{Pr}(A \cap B) > \operatorname{Pr}(A \cap \neg B) \) could in fact be true, or that what should be interpreted as \( \operatorname{Pr}(A \cap B) \) is actually the conditional probability \( \operatorname{Pr}(A|B) \), in which case \( \operatorname{Pr}(A|B) > \operatorname{Pr}(A) \) could in fact be true. This speaks more to the way that natural human language is unsuited to the subtleties of the language of probability theory, yet rather than address these possibilities, the author again leaves the discussion there, implying disdain for people who are too stupid to know better. Another problem is that throughout the book, the author raises the question of how to determine whether a particular sequence of observations of outcomes for a process that may be random reflects a specific probability distribution model, but never clearly explains how to do this in practice, instead only giving hints about this through various examples. This is related to the question of why one may prefer an explanation based on probabilities than based on deterministic phenomena, particularly for small sample sizes. For this, I will give an example. Consider exactly 5 observations of an event, which has binary outcomes (either success or failure), for which no other observations are made, and for which in all of those 5 observations, success occurs every single time. Intuitively, laypeople might be inclined to believe that there is a deterministic cause of this, while if a probability theorist were to initially believe that this is consistent with a binomial distribution with \( (N, p) = (5, 0.6) \) but then later revise this to \( (N, p) = (5, 0.99) \), laypeople could reasonably wonder why this would be justified, and why the probability theorist refuses to believe in the possibility of some deterministic causal relationship. Of course, this is a contrived example, I understand why causation needs to be proved as an alternative to a null hypothesis, and I understand that probability distributions closer to uniform probabilities are favored as those that maximize entropy (which essentially means that subject to certain known constraints, the probability distribution that best reflects the state of ignorance about a system is closest to uniform), but the author does not properly explain these points. Finally, the broadest problem with this book is that the author only superficially acknowledges the issue that if every calculation in probability theory or statistics, whether of a certain event happening, a string of events being a true "hot streak", or a model fitting data correctly, is itself a probability, then the aforementioned disconnect of this language of probability from natural human language makes it difficult to translate probabilities into robust rules for deterministic (usually binary) decisions that laypeople must make; this is related to the idea that in game theory, a single person playing a single-shot game cannot play a mixed strategy, and the concept of a mixed strategy only makes sense in the context of observing a large ensemble of independent players, possibly playing repeatedly. Perhaps asking the author to address this problem is too much, but I still feel like such failures diminish the book in comparison to its hype.

Without hyping my own credentials, I admit that it is possible that my reaction to this book is more of a reflection of my greater experience with STEM, humanities, and social science fields and with science education/communication compared to when I was in high school. Furthermore, just as this book exhorts, I cannot be overcome by either positivity bias or negativity bias; it would only be fair to take the good & bad parts of this book together as appropriate, without believing that one outdoes or cancels the other. Given this, I can't really make a strong recommendation that readers should or should not read this book.

Book Review: "The Social Contract" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Now that I have been able to properly enjoy the summer, having essentially finished my PhD work, I've recently read the book The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (translated from French to English by Willmoore Kendall); this was a book that I got from a friend who moved away a few years ago, but never got around to reading until now. This is one of the classic texts of political philosophy from the European Enlightenment era, and came before many of the seminal events of world history, including the American & French Revolutions and the European colonization & subsequent independence of much of Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America. The author provides his own refutations of many of the arguments for hereditary monarchy and instead forcefully argues for a legislature, separate from the executive, that is conducted as a direct democracy, even while acknowledging that different circumstances for different states may suggest different forms & sizes for the executive. The book includes many examples from ancient & medieval European history, and while much of the discussion of cultures outside of Europe seems antiquated or racist to modern eyes, I imagine it was typical of its time & place.

It was really interesting to see such broad imagination of democratic & republican societies before they came to be in Europe & North America. However, the book itself is not an easy read: it basically feels like a polemical political treatise written in the terse style of the textbooks by the physicists Landau & Lifshitz, in which every definition and proposition must be carefully parsed & understood individually and also as part of a broader whole. The arguments are built up slowly, so patience is required too; frequently, I found myself wondering how the author could fail to acknowledge certain seemingly-elementary rebuttals to his arguments, only to find such acknowledgments after several pages. Originally, I thought the translator's introduction about how to read the book were basically excuses meant to cover for bad writing, but as I read through more of the book, I came to appreciate it more.

There are a few comments that I have about the contents. The first is that it isn't clear to me how citizens, in the author's view, are supposed to resume the exercise of natural rights, which have been pooled into the sovereign & redistributed as civil rights, when the social contract is thought to be violated, especially as it also isn't clear to me how to distinguish a violation of the social contract from an individual's unhappiness with the general will going against that individual's private will. Related to this, it isn't clear to me how a citizen, acting to debate & make laws for the sovereign to further the general will, is supposed to act completely separately, as a sort of Jekyll/Hyde situation, from that person's thoughts as an individual, because the execution of laws furthering the general will may affect that individual and others perhaps not particularly naming those people but naming a certain group affiliation, and it becomes hard then to define the general will in that context. The second is that so many of the author's arguments regarding the formation of a new state seem to depend on their being a full vacuum of power beforehand, with only the barest acknowledgment that new societies & nations don't emerge from a vacuum; to be fair, many of the great upheavals that figure prominently in my imagination regarding this point came after the publication of this book, but enough had happened which the author mentioned that this sparing treatment of the issue seems odd. I also have some more minor comments, namely that I'm not sure if the author's specific claims about the intertwined nature of politics & religion in ancient societies would be validated by modern scholarship, and the author's claims about there being no "true" Christian soldiers seems to rely too much on a no-true-Scotsman fallacy.

I would certainly need to reread this book carefully to better appreciate it, and perhaps that could address at least some of my comments. In any case, I'd only recommend this book to people with a serious deeply-rooted interest in political philosophy, who can appreciate the book and the context of its time & place, as opposed to novices like myself.

FOLLOW-UP: Sexual Harassment, Power Dynamics, and Institutions

Last year, I wrote a post motivated by a case of sexual harassment and assault committed by a professor in my department against a student in his group. The incidents happened in the spring of last year, but the news about the incidents and the nominal punishment only came at the end of the year. Since then, there have been further developments, as described in this article (by Marcia Brown in The Daily Princetonian), so I am writing this post as a follow-up regarding the specific developments of this case and our department's response, even as my post last year was my attempt at exploring the broader issues at stake. Essentially, Princeton University had reason early this year to investigate further claims of past consensual relationships between that same professor and other direct professional dependents (students & postdoctoral associates), and suspended him for the spring semester and summer as they conducted their investigation. The university concluded the investigation with findings of guilt on his part of having engaged in at least one such consensual relationship, and as that is a violation of university rules, he was fired. Follow the jump to read more about my thoughts regarding this; as mentioned above, compared to my previous post on this subject, this post will have more of my raw emotional reaction to this whole process and to the specifics of this case rather than a more measured take on the broader issues at stake.

Book Review: "Narconomics" by Tom Wainwright

I've recently read the book Narconomics by Tom Wainwright. It's an exposition into the economics of Latin American drug cartels, looking at them as businesses rather than mysterious criminal entities. In particular, it considers the competition versus monopolistic/monopsonistic behavior on the demand- & supply-sides, issues of global operations and outsourcing, diversification in products, cartel hierarchies versus franchising, public relations versus employee incompetence, and so on. Of course, as the drugs discussed in this book are illegal for the most part, there are other issues of dealing with the police and the government, whether through hiding, bribery, or warfare, and with enforcing things like non-compete agreements and franchise territories through violent means in the absence of legal recognition (where a court system could otherwise peacefully mediate such disputes). The aim of this book is to step back from the emotionally charged rhetoric of the "war on drugs" by seeing them in terms similar to legitimate businesses, and in doing so defeat the scourges of the illegal drug trade in the long-run through economically-minded legislation rather than ineffective brute force.

The book is not too long, quite accessible, well-written, and engaging to anyone with a high school-level understanding of microeconomics and an interest in issues surrounding illegal drugs. There are a few issues I have with the book though. One is that while the focus is clearly on Latin America, I would have liked to see at least some parallel discussion about the flow of drugs from Central/South Asia (particularly Afghanistan) to Europe and the economics therein, as that is mentioned a few times without further details. Another is that the last numbered chapter discusses legalization exclusively in the context of marijuana/cannabis, even though there is a discussion about the much narrower margin between safe and fatal doses for other drugs (especially heroin) compared to cannabis, which then raises questions about whether the legalization of marijuana is really meant to be a model for legalization/regulation of other currently illegal harder drugs; the epilogue addresses this point adequately with more nuance, but the structure of the final chapter still seems subpar for that reason. Finally, my biggest issue regards the discussions of how the operations of drug cartels in Latin America are influenced by how they can compete with the governmental "monopoly" on force due to unresponsive, complicit, corrupt, or ineffectual governments, and how cartels can compete with other economic opportunities through wages, protection, and other benefits. In particular, my concern is that the book acknowledges how legalization of drugs often economically incentivizes supply-side consolidation (as being outlawed necessarily limits how large drug operations can grow before attracting government attention), but in conjunction with other trends like offshoring of drug production too, it isn't clear how people in poorer Central American countries will further benefit; while the reduction in violence that would almost surely accompany restricted legalization of drugs is certainly a laudable goal, it is unclear whether the resulting economic opportunities, given the continuing poor governance and paucity of other good economic opportunities there, will really work to better the lives of those people, or whether the situation will devolve into large drug companies bullying small countries as in the banana republics of several decades ago (as discussed in the book) or tobacco or fast food companies doing the same to such countries today. In light of that, while the suggestions made in the book for improving outcomes of drug policy do seem like they would certainly help to some extent, I can't help but feel that the title of the epilogue, that economists make the best police officers, smacks of hubris. Apart from those issues, I'd recommend this to anyone interested in the subject.

Sexual Harassment, Power Dynamics, and Institutions

I've been thinking (read: armchair philosophizing without necessarily going into much depth) lately a bit about the notion of individuals shaping the interactions they have with other people versus the other way around, and the related notion of how individuals shape institutions versus the other way around. This idea has stuck in my mind especially in the context of sexual harassment committed by a professor against a student in my department (for a broad overview, see this article by Alanna Vagianos in HuffPost, and for a more detailed account, see this article by Allie Spensley in The Daily Princetonian; disclaimer: I know the student but not the professor), because of the complicated way that power imbalances between faculty and students intertwine with institutional tensions at large research universities like Princeton University. Follow the jump to see more blather from me about this.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Rape Accusations

About one and half months ago, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the (now former) head of the International Monetary Fund, was accused of rape by a Guinean maid in New York. According to the maid, she was in the hotel room in New York where Strauss-Kahn was staying when he approached her, tried to force her to have sex, and then raped her.

Now, it looks like there are serious questions about the validity of the charges. It seems to me that the consensus is that the rape never happened (though we'll never know for sure, one way or another), because the maid was the only witness to this alleged crime, and she seems to have credibility issues. Specifically, she has admitted to lying to the grand jury about the events before, during, and after the rape, having issues with her asylum papers, and being involved in a money-laundering scheme involving accusing Strauss-Kahn of rape. Basically, the prosecution's case has fallen apart.

The issue here is that in reaction to the centuries of men getting away with rape without consequence, American society is such that accusers victimized of rape are automatically believed and accused rapists' names are blackened forever in the eyes of society, whether the rape accusation is true or not (i.e. society automatically makes assumptions regardless of the veracity of the claim). So do we need to find a middle ground?

Well, that would be nice, but I think (and I'm about as far as you can get from a legal scholar here) an easier idea might be to use libel law effectively. In the US, compared to other countries, libel law practically doesn't exist, thanks to a very strong First Amendment. As far as I remember/understand, if a prosecutor wants to have any chance of winning a libel/slander suit, the prosecutor has to show that the defendant put out knowingly false information about the prosecutor with malicious intent. Only then can a case have any chance of proceeding. That's why so many libel/slander lawsuits in the UK, such as the one an association of chiropractors put out against author Simon Singh regarding him calling them a bunch of quacks, would have no chance of going through in the US; those cases are really just the defendant engaging in trivial name-calling or telling hard truths that the prosecutor doesn't like to hear/see. But in this case, a rape accusation is really serious, and here, the maid seems to have accused Strauss-Kahn of rape knowing that accusation was false and did so with malicious intentions, so I think a libel/slander suit would hold more weight in this case.

A very similar case happened in Maryland a couple years ago where a few girls who didn't like their male teacher (I think for correctly giving them bad grades because they did poorly on assignments and tests) falsely accused him of raping/sexually assaulting them. Though the accusations were found to be false and the teacher was acquitted, the damage had been done, as the teacher lost the trust of family and close friends and couldn't find a decent job in a nice place for a very long time (because he was known as a sex offender). At the same time, the girls who did this knowingly with malice got away without any punishment at all for ruining an honest man's life.

So I think in both cases, the accused rapists could and should press libel/slander charges against the accusers for ruining their lives and careers knowingly and maliciously. Rape is terrible, horrible, atrocious thing. False accusations of rape are nearly just as bad.

(UPDATE: I just read an article about an author who accused Strauss-Kahn in 2002 of sexually assaulting her. It appears that the case has come back into the public eye again, and Strauss-Kahn is denying the charges and is planning to sue her for slander. That said, I don't know if that's going to work out here, because there aren't any big questions about the accuser's credibility here (yet).)

Movie Review: Liar, Liar

Yesterday night I watched the movie Liar, Liar on DVD with my family. The plot synopsis is fairly simple: Jim Carrey plays a lawyer who succeeds in life by lying not just to his clients and coworkers but to his family as well. When he promises to show up at his son's 5th birthday party but fails to do so, his son makes a wish that his father can't tell a lie for a day, and it comes true; from that, hilarity ensues.
I thought the movie was full of laughs from start to finish. It's family-friendly, and never once is it truly raunchy (save of course for the sex scene with Jim Carrey's character's partner, which is the reason why he can't make it to the birthday party). I did think the ending with him driving the airplane staircase next to the airplane was too exaggerated and overwrought. Other than that, though, it's a movie I would recommend to anyone.

Class Discussion on IP

Yesterday in my web design, the lecturer was a guest speaker. This particular guest speaker is my college's IP attorney, and as we are designing websites, our professor feels that we should be suitably aware of the issues surrounding IP so as to not get sued. At first, I was highly skeptical as a similar talk my high school librarian gave last year was almost totally propaganda in favor of IP-protection and the wonders it does for creative works. That said, I listened to the whole talk, and I'm glad that the attorney delivered the facts straight without injecting too much of his own opinion into the discussion, and he made it clear that we should be aware of IP laws mainly for our own defense (and not necessarily to clog the system with more IP). Whenever he did (occasionally) inject his own opinion into the discussion, he made it fairly clear that he thinks that the current state of IP is a mess and that the current copyright term is way too long for its own good. All I want to say is that I'm glad there's at least one IP lawyer out there who understands that the status quo is bad without being blinded by the powerful interests in the field of IP.
On a totally unrelated note, I have come to the realization that the reason why some widgets on this blog don't look right is because I am using these new widgets on a very old template. I can't even take advantage of the new Blogger Template Designer to tweak it. For this reason, there is going to be an overhaul in the way this blog looks; though I will try to preserve the current look and feel, it will be a more current template so that I can use widgets without having to deal with things like overlapping text. I hope to finish this by the weekend.

Torture as of 25 August 2009

The biggest news out there now seems to be about the recent decision by the Obama Administration to investigate the actions from the previous Administration regarding "enhanced interrogation techniques" (i.e. torture). There has been a litany of articles out there both for and against investigation. I'm sure many of the articles against it are because investigations will taint the author, but some have legitimate concerns about how it will affect the country if it is done at the same time as the economic recovery, health care reform, and energy reform. My take follows.
President Obama pledged in his Inaugural Address that the government would do the right thing, even (or especially) if it wasn't the easiest or most expedient thing to do. I would say health care reform and the investigation of the previous Administration's actions regarding torture are the best examples of this that exist right now. Most opinions that argue against investigation argue for expedience and moving on. I beg to differ. This is a nation built upon the rule of law, so if we don't at least investigate the actions in question if not prosecute the people in question, we are essentially letting off the previous Administration for actions that could have more easily occurred in a dictatorship. They smashed the law to pieces and we can't let that slide as a nation.
Furthermore, many against investigation, some within the previous Administration (most notably Dick Cheney), have said that the memos about torture would vindicate the means by showing the successful ends (i.e. that torture really did provide valuable information about future terrorist threats). They also add that torture would be invaluable in the ticking time bomb scenario, in which a terrorist suspect who is caught must spill all the beans if a terrorist attack were to happen a few hours later. Both are patently false.
Look at the case of FBI interrogator Ali Soufan (the torture was carried out by the CIA, who essentially dumped FBI interrogators and ignored the information they got though the FBI interrogators were far more experienced with this than their CIA counterparts). He was tasked with interrogating terror suspect Abu Zubaydah; he did not torture once, and he even managed to get the respect of Zubaydah through kinder (that's relative) but persistent questioning. When Zubaydah kept denying his identity, Soufan searched through Zubaydah's files and found that his [Zubaydah's] mother called him "Hani" as a pet name; when Soufan used this against him, he was stunned and gave out a whole lot of information. Soufan managed to gain his respect by giving him sugar-free cookies at a meeting once (due to Zubaydah's diabetes) and they managed to share a laugh at Zubaydah's request for a Coke after he railed against capitalism. Later, when Soufan showed a bunch of photographs of other terror suspects to Zubaydah, the latter identified that of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by the alias "Mukhtar"; the FBI knew who K. S. Mohammed was but was stumped by the persistent appearence of the alias "Mukhtar" in al-Qaeda's internal communications and could not make the connection until then - no torture required. Then, CIA interrogators essentially kicked out Soufan and began waterboarding Zubaydah; they got 0.0 useful information from him.
Then consider the idea of the ticking time bomb scenario. The idea is that under such constraints of time, torture is the easiest, fastest, and most effective method of interrogation. This is also false, in that rarely does the ticking time bomb scenario occur (it's more of a thought experiment, really), and when it has occurred, regular interrogation has proved as useful if not more so than torture in the same scenario. Look at the case of when Saddam Hussein was captured. Soldiers in Iraq did a few on-the-spot interrogations (on the streets or in homes) of terror suspects and ordinary citizens, using classic psychological methods such as threatening shame upon the person and his family if they didn't talk (among other methods). Successful interrogation led to the capture of Saddam 6 hours later - no torture required.
I'm glad that Obama is pursuing investigations of these actions, as that should bring up our moral standing in the world again.