Legal reform rationale

Supporting the courts from Simcha Rotman’s accusations: a rebuttal

In his Haaretz interview “Down with the Court” (Feb 23, 2023), Simcha Rotman has articulated his rationale of the Legal reform that he promotes for legislation these days and he explained why this reform not only that it will not weaken the Israeli democracy but will strengthen it. He starts with clarifying that while he sees no problem of democracy (and of academic freedom) in Hungary, he does see a problem of democracy and of academic freedom in Israel.

Rotman argues that Israel’s elite (courts and academia) are both dominated by a narrow group (Secular/left/Ashkenazi), which does not match the profile of the population and who only promote people from their own type, so that right wing or HAREDI populations do not get a fair representation in the leading elites. For that reasons, he believes that the legal reform rule that has the nomination of judges by politicians is fully justified to repair an unfair inbalance.

Rotman does not discuss the problems of making the judicial dependent on the government (i.e., destroying its independence) but many people who are strongly concerned about the legal reform (in its present form), find the criticism of the Israeli elites, somewhat convincing, and concede that some type (though not this) reform may be needed. The aim of this rebuttal is to argue that, in fact, the procedures at place in Israeli academia and legal systems are well justified and that nominations based on political or religious affiliations will not make them fairer and will destroy these institutions. Since I am scientist (Tel-Aviv University, School of Psychology, and School of Neuroscience) I will focus on the Israeli academia.

Rotman starting point is a true regularity. There is indeed a correlation between academic/legal status and political and religious affiliation. In the academia, for example, the majority of senior staff, are liberal/secular, rather than conservative/religious. I do not know if in Israel today, there is also a correlation with ethnic origins (except for Arabs or Ethiopian Jews; for most of the academics I am even not confident of their ethnic origins, which are often quite mixed). I agree that such (ethnic) correlations should worry us and we need to think of ways to reduce them. I do not think the same is the case for correlation between academic status and political views. I explain this below.

Rotman takes the correlation between liberal-secular views and academic status to indicate a causal process: the bias being caused by the procedures used by academics in hiring new people — we prefer people who are like us: secular/liberals (I agree that if such a bias exist, it would be unfair.) To balance this bias, Rotman wants to apply a type of affirmative action bias in favour of conservative/religious groups.

While the correlation between academic status or secular-liberal values exists, it is one of the first aspects of science education to understand the fundamental difference between causation and correlation. Every beginning scientist learns that correlation does not imply causation. As illustrated in the simple diagram below, a correlation between eating ice-cream and getting sunburn may exist, but is not due to the former causing the latter. Rather both are caused by another factor (sunny weather)

Similarly, it is possible that the fact that correlation between academic/legal status and liberal-secular views is caused by some other factor (than biased procedures, which I will label as Hypothesis-₀). Without pre-judging any of those causal hypotheses let’s enumerate two alternatives:

H₁) The study of sciences, arts and philosophy, which are the foundation of any western education are influencing people to endorse liberal-secular values.

H₂) Young people from religious (Haredi) communities do not undertake academic studies, and thus they self-select themselves out.

Let’s denote these 3 causal hypotheses, as H_0. (biased procedures), H₁ (the impact of western studies), and H₂ (the self-selection of Haredi groups). Obviously more hypotheses than those may exist, and more than one could be contributing to the observed correlation. Below I consider each of the 3 hypotheses.

H₁: the correlation between liberal/conservative views and level of education seems a robust one around the world. In US, for example, most Trump supporters and QAnon followers have lower education, and in UK most Brexit voters (who followed the conservatives to exit the EU in order to enhance national suzerainty), have lower education. This indicates that this pattern is broader and not particular to Israel. It is quite possible that people trained on critical thinking (in science or western philosophy) are more likely to support liberal and universal values compared to nationalistic/ religious ones. Also people who are educated in sciences including physics and evolution theory, are less likely to be convinced by creationist theories of the universe.

H₂: Unfortunately, Haredi children do not study MIKZTOOT LIBA and they are told by their leaders that “Math and English have never achieved anything for Jews”. Without this preparation their ability to get accepted and compete in universities is strongly reduced. In addition, they have a difficulty with the integrated male-female environments, which further turns HAREDI people away from academic studies.

H₀ Are the procedures biased against religious/conservative people?

I do not see this to be the case, but it is always difficult to rule out unconscious factors. However, here are some descriptives of our procedures that may hopefully mitigate such factors):

1. The main criteria that is followed in academic hiring is academic (scientific) excellency. This is backed up by objective measures like publications and impact factors, and political views are never discussed when meeting a job-candidate (it is against procedures and considered of bad taste to engage in such discussion with a job-candidate).
2. The selection is being done by a vote of all members of staff (more than 25 people), which reduce the chance of few people being able to pressurize the others. There are also multiple candidates and there are typically different views being presented and discussed on the basis of academic excellency only.
3. To further reduce unconscious biases we undertake “diversity training”.

While we cannot totally rule out H₀, I believe that the support for it is weak, surely compared with the causal factors, H₁ and H₂.

Conclusions

While it is unfortunate that the representation of HAREDI population is reduced in the academic and legal establishments, this appears due to the effect of education itself, or to the self-isolation of this population from academic studies. Given this situation, one may ask if it would be helpful or fair to apply an affirmative bias procedure to preferentially select such candidates in academic or legal jobs. Such a procedure would require that, although the fraction of religious/conservatives students within a field, is about 10-20 %, their fraction within the establishment should be kept at 50%. Obviously such a practice would have two serious problems. First it would be unfair to the individuals, who will be rejected despite being better (or working harder) compared to accepted candidates on objective measures. Secondly, it will reduce academic excellence, and will create a polarised and divided society that is segregated into different groups. I personally, have both left-liberal and religious-conservative colleagues with whom I was able to benefit from fruitful discussions. Once political views become a factor, all this will be destroyed. Finally, while I agree that we should aspire to equal representation, the way to achieve this is to act early (on the education of children); unfortunately, Rotman and his fellows oppose this.

I want to end with two observation. First, Rotman, like many other in the present coalition are trying to make a case against the elites of the Israeli society. Unfortunately, this is not the first such program. The ultimate anti-elite experiment was experimented with, in China’s cultural revolution, and it ended with millions of deaths. Let’s hope that the program of Rotman and his fellows will have less tragic results.

Second, I wonder how a person who is described as sharp and intelligent like Rotman, can conflate causation with correlation (or at least show no awareness of the problem). There are two options, both quite concerning. i) Despite his marked rhetorical skills Rotman lacks the basics of science education and critical reasoning, in which case we should be doublethink our willingness to trust him with the future of our country. ii) More likely, he does understand it but he doesn’t care, as long as it serves his rhetorical aims (if he really cared of the representation of haredi people in the state elite he would support children’s study of Miktzoot Liba). This is even more concerning.