July 16, 2008
Tortured Views
In a few earlier posts, most recently in Venture Socialism, I've noted that the use of torture was by no means rare in the world, and that those who hyperventilated about it lately had an unrealistic and uniformed view of things. Perhaps this is correct? As repugnant as torture is, the fact is most countries -- even those with democratic governments -- do it. . . An average of 78 percent of the governments in the world used torture against at least one person under their control in any given year during the last 25 years of the 20th century, according to Moore and Ryals. Those who used it in a given year faced a 93 percent chance of continuing the practice the next year. "Politicians and pundits speak in highly moralistic language that suggests that because torture is abhorrent, it is abnormal and unusual," the researchers wrote. "While it is abhorrent, it is neither abnormal nor unusual. Human...
May 20, 2008
Fairy Dust
The longing for sacrifice - hair shirt self-abnegation - that underpins the appalling views of green fashion victims about agriculture discussed in the previous post are pervasive - a large part of their views about energy too. The lack of research funding that Revkin discussed is a symptom of a deeper conflict. The denial of the growing evidence of - yes - "peak oil" by commentators on the Right resembles their vociferous denial of global warming (more sophisticated responses now reveal that, all along, it wasn't the reality of global warming that bothered them; it was the implications. And they are daunting). The same is true of the reaction on the Right about Peak Oil (in fairness, there's a good deal of techno-optimism on the Left as well; while the Right thinks there's plenty of oil - enough in ANWR to run our civilization for another century, it is implied - the Left thinks we're going to replace oil...
May 16, 2008
More Indignities
The earlier post Bio-Squick, which linked Pinker's critique of using dignity, whatever that means, as an argument for some set of values that advocates wish to make the law of the land, blithely skipped past the main discussion of Leon Kass and a report from the President's Council on Bioethics: Human Dignity and Bioethics. Regime change is near, this stuff is history. But conservatives are outraged. Steven Pinker's assault on the President's Council on Bioethics and its recently-released of batch of essays is just as shoddy and bizarre as Yuval Levin says it is. Pinker wants scientists, like himself, to be the social arbiters of morals. How’s he doing so far? Pinker’s essay is a striking exhibit of a set of attitudes toward religion and the West’s moral tradition that has become surprisingly common among America’s intellectual elite. It is a mix of fear, suspicion, and disgust that has a lot to do, for instance, with the Left’s intense...
May 14, 2008
Bio-Squick
Or, the rise of the ice-cream police. Many people are vaguely disquieted by developments (real or imagined) that could alter minds and bodies in novel ways. Romantics and Greens tend to idealize the natural and demonize technology. Traditionalists and conservatives by temperament distrust radical change. Egalitarians worry about an arms race in enhancement techniques. And anyone is likely to have a "yuck" response when contemplating unprecedented manipulations of our biology. The President's Council has become a forum for the airing of this disquiet, and the concept of "dignity" a rubric for expounding on it. . . Whatever that is. The problem is that "dignity" is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it. The bioethicist Ruth Macklin, who had been fed up with loose talk about dignity intended to squelch research and therapy, threw down the gauntlet in a 2003 editorial, "Dignity Is a Useless Concept." Macklin argued that bioethics has done just...
March 09, 2008
More Bogusity
Continuing the thoughts in the earlier post, Bogusity, (or should that be bogosity?) about research findings and their interpretations. Well designed experiments and observations yield data that has intrinsic value, but the interpretation of that data seems to be a sand box where superstitions and biases often play. Consider this: Experimental evidence for reciprocity comes from behavioral game theory, which uses economic games in which subjects make choices under varied social conditions. For instance, Herrmann et al. employ a public goods game in which each of four anonymous subjects is initially given 20 tokens, and each is told he can place any number of these tokens in a public account. The tokens in the account are multiplied by 1.6 and the result divided evenly among the four. At the end of the experiment, the tokens are exchanged for real money. In this game, each individual helps the group most by placing his 20 tokens in the public account, and...
October 31, 2007
Ho Ho Ho
No, wait, that's a different holiday. Whatever. You will recall that in March, some Serbian vampire hunters attempted to properly stake the mortal remains of Slobodan Milosevic, so as to prevent him from troubling the world in un-death as he had in life. (Via Warren Ellis.) By all accounts, half a year later Milosevic is still, thankfully, dead: once again, I ask, could this be coincidence? There's more. It's a bag-o-treats. Dig in. Gingerly, there might be sharp and/or pointed objects embedded....
October 15, 2007
Legless Facts
An earlier post, Disease Control, cited some US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention research that lamented the fact that attempts to debunk health myths failed to a large extent because they repeated the myth, and that's what subjects remembered, with the kicker that it was from an authoritative source! When ... social psychologist Norbert Schwarz had volunteers read the CDC flier, however, he found that ... three days later, they remembered 40 percent of the myths as factual. ... Most troubling was that people ... now felt that the source of their false beliefs was the respected CDC. I responded that "just any old smear won't do. It has to have legs. It isn't that "whoever makes the first assertion about something has a large advantage over everyone who denies it later", it is that a good smear is difficult to refute". Perhaps I am mistaken, Facts Prove No Match for Gossip, It Seems. “If you know you...
October 15, 2007
Bon Mot
Think nice today. The principle of comparative advantage is one of those ideas that can completely transform the way you see the world, once you really internalise it. That everyone, even those who are best at nothing, can benefit themselves and others through co-operation is a beautiful idea that points to the possibility of a benevolent world....
October 09, 2007
Beauty Light
I am too busy to think, so I do it to excess. Weird that. I can't relax since the task list is impossibly long. Even while working 12 hour days I feel like I'm shirking if I talk to you. But the anxiety of time pressure ignites my mind, heightens my perceptions and makes me vulnerable to reality when it shyly or boldly exposes itself to me at unexpected moments. All day today I have been intoxicated by the light. When the sun is lower in the southern sky, on a clear day, it's like those brief moments in the morning and evening when everything sparkles, the colors are incandescent and contrasts are heightened. It's what photographers, some of them anyway, call beauty light. There's a crew of ad men that come around here sometimes to shoot stills and videos advertizing dirt bikes, quads and such. They pay good for access to private land with interesting features where they...
October 06, 2007
Flawed Heroes
Last year at about this time there was some discussion of vigilantism prompted by thoughts about 9/11. This seems to be a yearly event now. He Needed Killin' explored some of the ideas. One of the striking changes in American society after 9/11/2001 was the number of solid citizens who remembered their roots - or at least the Hollywood version - and voiced interest in some vigilantism. The conflict is that the acts of vigilantes are criminal - outside the law - but are viewed by some as necessary, at least in the early days of a society. The mythology of the American west abounds with examples, though this isn't formal argument or proof of the proposition. The example that was used in the comments following that post comes from the film The Searchers. Ward Bond has to arrest John Wayne and take him to trial even though the creep needed killin'. The president who tortures to save the...
September 08, 2007
Agonistic Liberalism
The other day Timothy's interest was piqued by a review of John Gray's Black Mass. Timothy notes that: Rauchway describes Gray as arguing that Thatcherite neoliberals assumed that reducing the size of the state and empowering markets would reinvigorate a mannered, respectable and traditionally moral middle-class culture within Britain. Instead, one of the fruits of neoliberalism on the domestic front was a less judgemental, more tolerant society that was even more socially and culturally decentralized than the post-1968 society the Thatcherites looked on with distaste. This, to Gray, explains the rise of neoconservative enthusiasm for state interventions into social, cultural and moral concerns. With adaptations, this argument seems useful in the United States as well. For me, one of the key convergences of the last two decades in American political life has been in arguments used by a culturalist right and a culturalist left. Both factions assume that the only way to explain why many Americans do not “naturally”...
April 15, 2007
Cause and Effect
One of the faults I find in much social research is that ideologically motivated researchers assume what they wish to prove, and then confirm thier biases. This seems to be a good example. Participants in laboratory games are often willing to alter others’ incomes at a cost to themselves, and this behaviour has the effect of promoting cooperation1–3. What motivates this action is unclear: punishment and reward aimed at promoting cooperation cannot be distinguished from attempts to produce equality4. To understand costly taking and costly giving, we create an experimental game that isolates egalitarian motives. The results show that subjects reduce and augment others’ incomes, at a personal cost, even when there is no cooperative behaviour to be reinforced. Furthermore, the size and frequency of income alterations are strongly influenced by inequality. Emotions towards top earners become increasingly negative as inequality increases, and those who express these emotions spend more to reduce above-average earners’ incomes and to increase below-average...
April 15, 2007
Tool Time
There's new meaning to the old saying "shooting yourself in the foot". According to new statistics that would make Bob Vila cringe, the number of injuries from nail guns has almost doubled since 2001. . . n fact, the number of weekend carpenters treated each year for nail gun injuries in emergency rooms in U.S. hospitals more than tripled between 1991 and 2005, increasing to about 14,800 per year. . . "The increases in injuries are likely related to availability of these tools on the consumer market and the steady decline in the costs of tools and air compressors," Lipscomb said. "The frequency of such injuries that are treated in emergency departments in professional workers have remained relatively flat; however, the tools are now readily accessible to consumers, extending what has been largely an occupational hazard to the general public." It seems that there might also be a decrease in whacked thumbs and other hammer related injuries, but they...
March 27, 2007
Green Noir
The landscape is littered with pundits and advocates who have perfect records of failure. They are always wrong, in obvious ways, and when finally forced to admit error just reinvent themselves with a new set of predictions and causes to advocate. There was an example of this in a recent post that quoted Bruno Latour lamenting that his deceitful practices had been hijacked by his opponents and used against him. I myself have spent sometimes in the past trying to show the "lack of scientific certainty" inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a "primary issue." But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argument–or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I'd like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from a prematurely naturalized objectified fact. Was I foolishly mistaken? Bullshit. The arguments were instrumental...
March 20, 2007
Beer Bribery
It works. Politicians have known this for centuries and now even physicists and mathematicians have caught on. Thus the reasoning behind eigenfactor.org, the latest brainstorm from Carl Bergstrom's lab — most of the actual code and elbow-grease being provided by Jevin West and Ben Althouse. It covers all the journals that impact factor would, but also gives an estimate of the impact of citations to non-journals (which lets us see that some software is more influential than some journals). Plus you get to see all kinds of useful things about how much the journals cost (something Carl's been interested in for some time), and how that breaks down by paper or by citation. All in all, it's a very fun and potentially very useful tool for anyone interested in the academic publishing system, and/or applications of Markov chains. Disclaimer/Incestuous Amplification: Rumors that Carl arranged for me to publicize everything his lab does in this weblog in exchange for beers...
March 18, 2007
Business Envy
While we are looking at Randall's posts let's do this one too. Scientists and engineers have knowledge that equip them in a variety of ways to hazard predictions about the future. Yet, being humans, they have assorted desires and needs that can bias their predictions away from the most likely future courses of events. This is Randall's concluding graf following a discussion of a Benny Peiser interview of Freeman Dyson about academic - especially British academic - doom mongering. Benny Peiser: Britain's leading cosmologists seem to be particularly gloomy about the future of civilisation and humankind. . . How do you explain this apocalyptic mood among leading cosmologists in Britain and the almost desperate tone of their pronouncements? Freeman Dyson: My view of the prevalence of doom-and-gloom in Cambridge is that it is a result of the English class system. In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class....
March 07, 2007
No Sale
To reason usefully one must consider all aspects of an issue. Burch's Law is a special case of a more general rule: Just because your ethics require an action doesn't mean the universe will exempt you from the consequences. If the universe were fair, like a sympathetic human, the universe would understand that you had overriding ethical reasons for your action, and would exempt you from the usual penalties. The judge would rule "justifiable homicide" instead of "murder" and exempt you from the usual prison term. Well, the universe isn't fair and it won't exempt you from the consequences. We know the equations of physics in enough detail to know that the equations don't contain any quantities reflective of ethical considerations. We don't send automobile manufacturers to jail, even though manufactured cars kill an estimated 1.2 million people per year worldwide. (One Holocaust per decade, or around 2% of the annual planetary death rate.) Not everyone who dies in...
March 02, 2007
Prohibition
See this telling exposure of the absurdity of the prohibitionist agenda: To Fly or Not to Fly (to California): That is the Question. [C]arbon offsets only really work if you assume that people in the developed world can pollute proportionally more than people in the developing world. If you give everyone on earth an equal share of a sustainable carbon footprint, then a single transatlantic round-trip flight is about 2 years worth of your allowable carbon output. . . I'm worse than most, flying a ridiculous amount so I can live in Manhattan and work for IFTF in Palo Alto (I fly out here about every six weeks, spewing approximately 4 tons of CO2 into the stratosphere per trip). Plus all the trips to client sites. So seeing that buying a TerraPass isn't going to be enough, I've been toying with the idea of taking the train out to California from New York for this year's Ten Year Forecast...
January 24, 2007
Winks, Squidgers?
It isn't merely child's play. The first thing the newly revived MIT Tiddlywinks Association wants people to know about the game of flicking small plastic discs into a cup is that it is not just a game of flicking small plastic discs into a cup. . . Tiddlywinks started in the late 1800s in England. In 1955, it resurfaced at Cambridge University, where a group of undergraduates were looking for a game to represent their school. Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web and recent recipient of the Draper Prize, played tiddlywinks. The game is played with sets of small, thin discs, known as winks, which are lined up on a mat. Using the larger disc, called the squidger, players pop the smaller discs into flight by snapping one side of the smaller disc with the edge of the larger one. . . There are two different versions. The first is the informal child's game in which the...
December 29, 2006
Cultural Perversity
During my catch-up reading blitz yesterday I skimmed a post that lamented the use of the term "protectionist" to describe those who wish to erect or maintain trade barriers. [Perhaps I will recall where I read that and add a link later.] The argument was that "protectionist" is too kind a term since it masks a destructive behavior less about protection of anything than preservation and enhancement of monopolies. I suppose it is protecting monopolies - and so is accurate, strictly speaking - but it conceals more than it reveals. One of the darker aspects of the impulse to restrict trade can be seen in the attempts of various autocratic regimes to censor cultural products and the ideas they encapsulate. Last year there was concern about attempts to censor the net, especially by China, yet the chief villain in this drama is the UN. UNESCO sought an international agreement allowing trade protectionism for cultural goods . . . which...
October 25, 2006
He Needed Killin'
The Hollywood version of the American southwest after the Indian wars and the closing of the frontier - and much earlier in Texas - is of rough, vigilante justice meted out by flawed heroes. The truly bad were tracked down and summarily dispatched with a minimum of fuss or passion. All in a day's work. There's some truth in that but it was as likely to be solid citizens as flawed heroes who did the deeds. One of the striking changes in American society after 9/11/2001 was the number of solid citizens who remembered their roots - or at least the Hollywood version - and voiced interest in some vigilantism. That's one of the reasons that Bush was applauded for his initial handling of the event. I'm putting this out there for your consideration with a fully conflicted heart. I don't feel diminished by the deaths of Mohammed Atta and the other creeps who killed thousands on September 11....
October 04, 2006
Grim U.
I've quoted this Roger Scruton piece a couple of times before. . . . intellectuals value their oppositional and transgressive stance far more than they value truth, and have a vested interested in undermining the practices — such as rational argument, genuine scholarship and open-minded discussion — which have truth as their goal. They will seize on the relativist arguments — even if they are as shoddy as Foucault’s or as empty as Rorty’s — as they will seize on any kind of mumbo-jumbo that silences the critic and furthers their subversive aims. And when they take hold of institutions they form a “confederacy of dunces” whose first aim is to exclude anyone who thinks out of line. That is why university departments in the humanities and social sciences are now such grim, bigoted places . . . There's another explanation for this sort of counter-productive behavior. Faculty positions and grant money are scarce commodities, and universities and funding...
September 17, 2006
Fluxology
Blues, Jazz, Bluegrass and inventive instruments. The colonists were surely musical. The Dopyera brothers were born in what is now Slovakia, and came to the U.S. with the wave of Eastern European immigrants around the beginning of the 20th century. (In fact, the word “Dobro” is both a contraction of “DOpyera BROthers” and the word for “good” in their native tongue.) Engineers, tinkerers, businessmen, and accomplished musicians (their family had a history of violin making going back centuries, and Rudy was by many accounts an exceptionally talented and soulful Gypsy-style violinist), the two Dopyera brothers combined their Old World skills and traditions with the booming technology and futuristic tastes in art of pre-WWII America. Who else thought that spun aluminum might be a good material for sound projection? Who else engraved beautiful Art Deco designs on the bodies of their guitars? Only the Dopyeras....
July 29, 2006
Vegetable Minds
Reasoning in good faith from evidence to conclusions is out of fashion, or more properly, still out of fashion. That's one aspect of the nonsensical views criticized in Crypto-religion. Those views, "that Americans have long been ambivalent about science", uniquely so in the author's view, were rebutted by pointing out the religious nature of scientific ambivalence in other parts of the world. Such ambivalence is more common than in the US but isn't attributed to religious views, though even a casual look shows that it is. Consider food fetishes. Many religions have them, and one of the clearest indicators of unreasoning faith in modern crypto-religion is food obsession and non-scientific, or even anti-scientific, justifications for them. Organic religion, vegetable religion and a bewildering variety of other health and diet fads are staples of life in many parts of the supposedly developed world, though the behaviors are more appropriate for the developing world where education is not as available. This...
June 24, 2006
I'm Late, I'm Late
It's not that there are no interesting things to talk about, it's that RL intrudes. I'm reduced to flying pointers. Catch this. This repudiation of the national idea is the result of a peculiar frame of mind that has arisen throughout the Western world since the Second World War, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political elites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognized: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. I call the attitude oikophobia – the aversion to home – by way of emphasizing its deep relation to xenophobia, of which it is the mirror image. Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested. As George Orwell pointed out, intellectuals on the Left...
June 14, 2006
Sweet Nothings
One of the agronomic, dietary and political fads of the moment is to demonize maize. It's subsidized, exhausts soil, sucks up water and makes you fat. It's the foundation of industrial agriculture in the US and some other nations, a fact that has economic and political implications as well as agronomic and environmental consequences. I've been saying much of this for years, online and offline. An incident that in some ways characterizes this long effort is a series of rants at the old Electric Minds virtual community in 1997 when I tried to convince Howard Rheingold and Bob Watson of these things. I was speaking heresy at the time but it has almost become conventional wisdom now. Unfortunately as the ideas have become more popular they have become less sensible, less accurate. Since there is less resistance it is now possible to make claims that don't stand up under scrutiny. They aren't so thoroughly scrutinized. One of those claims...
June 07, 2006
Grimmer Than Thou
The earlier post Narratives delved into some of the reasons for the failures of media to report accurately or do useful analyses of events. The dominant leftward tilt of the media was one explanation but that was further decomposed into a propensity for gloom in western thought, especially on the left, and the odd effects of group dynamics in which views tend to slide toward the grim. It may also be a competition of sorts. [via A&L Daily] Until recently, no one knew who is right, because no one was keeping score. But the results of a 20-year research project now suggest that the skeptics are closer to the truth. I describe the project in detail in my book Expert Political Judgment: How good is it? How can we know? The basic idea was to solicit thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts about the fates of dozens of countries, and then score the predictions for accuracy. We find...
June 04, 2006
Seattle Borg
A couple of weeks ago (how time flies!) I linked and quoted a bit from Brad Allenby's May column. It bears repeating. Under conditions of systems and ontological complexity which push people beyond their adaptive capacity, retreat to fundamentalism -- religious, environmental, scientific, philosophical, ideological -- is a common response. Unfortunately, such responses are profoundly dysfunctional . . . It is not that fundamentalism or ideologies are necessarily “bad,” although they have certainly spilled their share of blood in the past century. But it is very clear that they are especially maladaptive in periods of rapid and fundamental change. If, then, the major adaptive mechanism to dauntingly rapid change, fundamentalism of various kinds, is dysfunctional, what is one to rely on? . . . For the individual, a difficult authenticity must be demanded; for the systems response, we must first accept the complexity of the world we have created, and our fairly pervasive ignorance of it, and learn to...
June 01, 2006
Factoids
One of the updates to Ugly Attention noted the fondness of activists for factoids, preferably alarmist factoids but any old factoid will do if it helps make a spurious point. Other posts have poked fun at food and agriculture poseur Michael Pollan, and the enviro-exploitation zine Grist. A recent interview of Pollan provides a useful example of factoid abuse. Most of the produce on the East Coast comes from the Central Valley of California. We're taking organic lettuce, grown with great care, terrific cultural practices, and we put it on a truck and we keep it cold from the moment we pick it, 36-degree cold chain all the way across the country for three to five days, and that takes 56 calories of fossil-fuel energy to get one calorie of organic lettuce. . . So if you're motivated by environmental considerations, you may find -- and I'm not telling anybody what to do, I'm just trying to give them...
May 31, 2006
Life is Messy
And so is intellectually honest scholarship and pedagogy. For me, the best possibilities of academic life are realized in an appreciation of nuance, complexity, subtlety, depth. What has disappointed me most about academia, a disappointment I have written about in my weblogs for three years now, are all the various ways in which a rich appreciation for the messiness and ambiguity of human life get boxed out or bracketed off in scholarly discussions and pedagogical work. If “politicized” courses, and “politicized” scholarship concern me–and they do–it’s largely because they’re part and parcel of the way that the necessary reductions of the unmanageable and incomprehensible variety of human experience turn into instrumental manglings and amputations, into grinding out scholarship and enrollments like sausage in a factory. This is one graf of very many written by Tim Burke about the recent ACTA report critical of academia in general for its left biases. As one might expect its a complicated and contentious...
April 25, 2006
Two Kinds
There are two kinds of people: those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don't. Lynne Kiesling points to a Forbes article by Rich Karlgaard that identifies two kinds of people: "opportunity seekers" love charging into the unknown future; "problem solvers" resist forward motion until all present-day problems are gone. This is in response to Virginia Postrel's dichotomy of people: dynamists and stasists. Both dichotomies ring false to me. There's something there that they are nibbling at but they haven't nailed it. An earlier attempt at the problem, Jane Jacobs' Systems of Survival, seems to have more depth. Her dichotomies are summarized by Stewart Brand here: THE COMMERCIAL MORAL SYNDROME Shun force. Come to voluntary agreements. Be honest. Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens. Compete. Respect contracts. Use initiative and enterprise. Be open to inventiveness and novelty. Be efficient. Promote comfort and convenience. Dissent for the sake of the task. Invest for productive purposes. Be...
January 07, 2006
The New Doom
The blogosphere is all a twitter about this Mark Steyn article, It's the Demography, Stupid. This Lileks Screed is a good example: I defy anyone to find anything in a modern newspaper as bracing or blunt – or as long, for that matter – as this much-discussed Mark Steyn piece on the decline of the West. . . The telling line in Steyn's piece quotes that fine Gaul Jean-Francois Revel: "Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself." I’ve read a lot of Revel; a great man and a profound, clear thinker. Lucky for him, he is old, and will not see his fears made manifest. Guilt is a problem, but it’s not the entire enchilada. It’s guilt married to a peculiar belief that Western Civilization is unique only in its sins. The only thing Western Civ really gave the world was slavery, imperialism, war, and...
December 25, 2005
Whiffed
Sometimes we see what we want to see, and so miss some interesting things. I hope I'm wrong (I really do), but I fear that too many people who read the following about Frank Perdue will regard such efforts as contemptible, low, mean, almost comical, unworthy of being ranked as great. In fact, such efforts are precisely the sort that makes our prosperity so vast and deep. . . But what was its [a Perdue chicken's] unique selling proposition? To hear Perdue himself tell it, his chickens were just plain better than anybody else's. . . he spent six months on the road, talking to butchers about what qualities they liked to see in their chickens. . . he mated a meaty-breasted Cornish male with a White Plymouth Rock female to create the Perdue pedigree. They didn't want bruised meat, so Perdue set strict protocols for handling live chickens. Ain't it great that someone -- someone who is a...
December 12, 2005
Doom Seeky
Nothing is more exciting to a doom monger than a disaster movie. Even a real disaster isn't as good since it can't be safely anticipated, savored and enjoyed repeatedly. Real disasters are so grubby, and they don't lend themselves to ridiculous moralizing and political activism. You might think they would since they are real, but when it's for real the critics out you for your perversions. They point and laugh. A movie sort of keeps it in the closet, gives you plausible deniablility. The fact that you love horror films doesn't mean that you want to become a slasher or a slasher victim or something, and loving disaster films doesn't mean you long for disaster. Or so you can claim. The pervs at worldwhingeing are dreaming of methane hydrate apocalypse. RealClimate explores in some detail today just how the frozen methane could melt, and what the result could be if it does so. The situation, as RealClimate sees it,...
November 17, 2005
Rebel, Rebel
This isn't really the all-Burke-all-the-time-network, it just seems that way. At any rate, Timothy points out in a comment to Paris Is Burning that Frank Furedi, the author of the article used to launch my diversity rap, has a "complicated ideological history". Too true. (Perhaps you will recall if I remind you Timothy that we discussed this in a BS thread many years ago when they were Living Marxism?) Just for phun I Googled Furedi to see what was being said about him and chose this Catallaxy post as a useful survey of opinion about Furedi and Spiked!. This entry at Source Watch, pointed to by the Catallaxy post, briefly states just how complicated that ideological history is. Frank Furedi is professor of sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. He was, while using pseudonym Frank Richards, the founder and chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) of Great Britain. The RCP has traversed one of the...
October 24, 2005
UNwise
Increasingly I wonder why anyone supports the UN? It has long been held in low regard by some but was defended by others who actively shielded it from exposure for its gaffes and corruption since it helped them further their domestic agendas. But its blunders in the Balkans and Africa were reconsidered in the media when it proved to be so inept in tsunami relief efforts. And then there's the cluster of Iraq blunders and corruption. Now they have punked themselves again. [via Norm] THE United Nations withheld some of the most damaging allegations against Syria in its report on the murder of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, it emerged yesterday. The names of the brother of Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, and other members of his inner circle, were dropped from the report that was sent to the Security Council. The confidential changes were revealed by an extraordinary computer gaffe because an electronic version distributed by...
September 30, 2005
Ship of Fools
Polemical Commentary plucked a quote from Andrew Rich's Think Tanks, Public Policy and the Politics of Expertise:, repeated here: p. 220, "The biggest worry for liberals, conservatives, and scholars alike should be the trend for think tanks - and increasingly experts of all kinds - to produce research that is little more than polemical commentary. This work diminishes the potential for its producers to have substantive influence with policy makers. Even more, this work, especially in its most ideological and most aggressively marketed forms, damages the reputation of experts generally among policy makers. The distinction between experts and advocates is tenuous. As we head into the future, the weakness of that distinction presents a fundamental challenge for think tanks, experts, and those who rely on them. The weakness threatens the quality of policy produced; for if trusted research and analysis is not available, what becomes the foundation for informed policy decisions?" It's a good question but it assumes that...
June 05, 2005
The Nose Knows
The sense of smell is often noted for its emotional significance, its ability to trigger emotional states and memory cascades. It's a secret passage into the mind, a direct path to the primitive lizard brain nestled beneath the civilized finery of the well clothed sophisticated mind. But it is also a weak sensory path for humans, orders of magnitude less acute than for most other animals, and often dismissed as having little importance. There is some difference by gender, the feminine being more attuned to odors if not truly more talented in detecting and distinguishing them. There is art as well as talent involved. Those who lose another input path, such as vision, often discover that there is much useful information in odor. It is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It isn't an absolute value about which all can agree though there is usually great overlap in judgements. Ugliness seems nearly if not equally...
June 03, 2005
Butt Found
Many people are described as lacking the ability to find their own butts even using both hands. Or, if found, distinguish them from random holes in the earth. This may be related since they may have found their butts but not realized that they had done so. Terry Teachout has apparently made such a discovery. There was a time not so very long ago, Teachout recalled, when students at Stanford, led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, stood in the streets crying out: "Hey hey! Ho ho! Western culture's got to go...!" Today, the idea of a cultural majority seems almost quaint. Whatever mainstream culture in the United States might have been at one time, today it has transformed into a series of fragmented communities, identities and demographics. These "lifestyle clusters" are providing an illustration of something that the recent elections have made all too clear: people of differing views are becoming more and more isolated from each other. We...
May 11, 2005
Cyber Clones
Any collection of information is useful only to the extent that you can access the information readily. Though hardly the first to grapple with the truth American librarian Melvil Dewey was inspired to create the Dewey Decimal System of Classification to bring some order to vast collections of books. But there is a fundamental defect to the idea of ordering information, indexing it by some type of abstraction; it conceals more than it reveals. Anything less than complete information loses information. The problem isn't that information needs order, it is that it needs search tools that can provide views of the whole collection of data filtered by selected criteria. But there's a problem here too in that a full search can take a long time and find so many matches that there is still too much for a human to digest. Finding something takes skill and talent even with good tools. Scholars and researchers require full information and are...
March 17, 2005
Ethereal Science
Norm points to a quasi-religious pseudo-science article in the Groan, one that supports his biases against meat eating. Of course, it's possible to mock here. But one can mock anything. Indeed sometimes it's an apt thing to do. But in itself mocking supplies no reasons. And reasons are also good - and needed. The reasons have been documented many, many, many times before so there is something disingenuous about asserting that reasons are needed, as if there were none. This is a common rhetorical tactic used to support weak ideas. Simply ignore the body of knowledge available and challenge others to refute an otherwise unsupported idea. A more intellectually honest approach would be to cite the reasons already given and, if possible, find fault with them. As bad as Norm's take is the Groan is worse, as we should expect. ...new research suggests that animals have far more complex cognitive and social skills than we gave them credit for......
February 27, 2005
Contrasts
The comments of Harvard president Larry Summers about women in science are interesting but the reactions to them are even more interesting. Timothy Burke says: Most of what I have to say about Larry Summers has been said already by others. He is not a martyr to political correctness. Many of his critics were exaggerated or extreme in their reaction, but the speech he gave was really quite weak. It’s perfectly ok to get up and say something like, “We have to remain open to a variety of explanations for the relative lack of women in the sciences, including genetic or innate differences between men and women”. But Summers didn’t say that: he went on to speculate that this was the correct hypothesis. The current state of knowledge on this subject suggests fairly strongly that this is not a good hypothesis. If you’re the president of Harvard, you ought to know that if you’re going to shoot your mouth...
February 24, 2005
Miserly Values
There's something repellent about most paleo-environmentalists, something deeply wrong in their value systems that oozes into their words and deeds producing mean-spirited acts. But it isn't just their values that are repellent, their reasoning is defective as well, perhaps a feedback phenomenon from their values. They are misers, convinced that there is only so much loot around and determined to get their propers, what they feel is owed them in some way. This is simple greed masquerading as fairness. Consider this miserly rant: Less than a quarter of the Earth's surface actually sports much in the way of life. The rest – the dark deep ocean, the high mountain peaks, the deserts and ice caps – isn't totally lifeless... But it's hard to make a living in a place where nature's bounty consists of a few bacteria going pokily about their business deep beneath the frozen ice. No, for our purposes, we've got a quarter of a planet. No,...
February 20, 2005
Undermining Society
An idea expressed in several earlier posts is that clumsy government policies that undermine and displace the efforts of citizens degrade society. The post Mama's Rules showed how this type of behavior has destroyed forests as well as forest management culture. The post Creating Chaos discussed how development aid destroys local initiative and culture. The central defect of such efforts is to respond to social need by replacing existing institutions with government institutions, rather than aiding those existing institutions. The result is degraded societies less able to advance themselves. They are less willing to engage in productive activities where there is risk of failure or government takeover, so society stagnates. Consider this example. if a significant percentage of the population lacks access to information services that could provide a significant foundation for other forms of innovation, who is going to bridge the gap, and how? If the delivery of information services is strictly the business of private companies, incumbent...
February 03, 2005
Healthy Dog
Robert Conquest's The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History sounds interesting so I've ordered it. Like his earlier work The Great Terror, 1968 and subsequent works such as The Harvest of Sorrow it is being met with initial rejection by many in academia. If, like those earlier works, it proves in time to be equally sensible it will be a good read now. Product Description: From the author of The Harvest of Sorrow and one of the world's most respected humanists comes this long-awaited work of history and philosophy. The Dragons of Expectation—in the tradition of Isaiah Berlin's The Crooked Timber of Humanity and George Orwell's Essays—brilliantly traces how seductive ideas have come to corrupt modern minds, to often-disastrous effects. From the onset of the Enlightenment to the excesses of democracy, Stalinism, and liberalism, Robert Conquest masterfully examines how false nostrums have infected academia, politicians, and the public, showing how their reliance on "isms"...
January 10, 2005
Family Affair
In Modest Praise Nicole-Anne Boyer was, err, modestly praised. It may seem as if I harbor a special enmity for Nicole-Anne Boyer since I have repeatedly dunked her pigtails in the ink well 1, 2, but as usual it's a special affection expressed through close attention and criticism. She's the best of the lot at WorldChanging, by a wide margin, and has her own blog at Fuzzy Signals, a venue worth visiting regularly and so resident in my blog roll. I'm sure this isn't how she sees herself but my take is that she's a sensible and well meaning person who has fallen in with a bad crowd. She indulges in the normal behavior of the bad crowd, flashing gang sign and parroting party line, but when she expresses herself about subjects that make her think virtue is revealed, a swan among ducks, but not aware of the vast distinction for lack of a mirror. In Book Review: In...
January 09, 2005
Tin Foil Time
Ken MacLeod alternates insightful posts with drooling paranoiac nonsense but is always entertaining. Today he quotes an article from conspiracy central. Do you find modern art baffling and depressing? Have you ever wondered if it's all a ridiculous hoax? Don't worry. It's meant to be baffling and depressing, and it is a ridiculous hoax. According to American leftist James Petras's review of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders [at Marxism-Leninism Today]... The Nazi attack on 'Degenerate Art' and some similarities between Nazi and Stalinist art have obscured some simple and obvious facts. The 'Degenerate Art' attacked by the Nazis was not the art foisted on us today. (What have the savage cartoons of Grosz in common with the pretentious trivia of BritArt?) One country's heroic statuary is much like another's heroic statuary. Vivid depictions of tanks and tractors, workers and soldiers look rather similar no matter who puts up the...
December 15, 2004
Invisible Pachyderm
Norm makes brief mention of Terry Eagleton's review of Frank Furedi's Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? Furedi's book has several other reviews 1 ,2 ,3 , 4 as well and seems to have touched some nerves in both academia and government. Noel Malcolm's review states the gist of the argument: What Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, mostly tries to do in this book is to analyse the growth of "philistinism" in our contemporary culture - the dumbing down of politics, the arts and education. It is true, of course, that in a dumbed-down society there will be less esteem for intellectuals; it is also true that, if the intellectuals themselves have participated in the dumbing down, they may no longer have anything smart to say... Universities, libraries, museums and art galleries are all under pressure to be "inclusive", to promote the "self-esteem" of the people who enter them, and so on. In short,...
December 13, 2004
Nice Idea...
but wrong species. SIAW mistakes gross external characteristics for the whole of reality. How about this for a radical new approach: why not leave religion to the religious (and the kind of blinkered liberals who get more upset about symbol than substance), and focus once again on the sources and forms of social division that can’t be chosen, from “race”, gender and sexual orientation to what used to be the chief concern of the left: class? hmmmm, class can't be chosen but religion can? I doubt that anyone raised in a religion would agree. They can choose not to practice and choose not to believe but they can't undo their past or force their families etc. to share their new beliefs. In many ways, in most places, religion is a far more determining issue than class. (Not to be confused with caste). Considering how quickly the babushkas were back in church after it became possible in the deformed republics...
December 03, 2004
Public Intellectuals
For the past few years there has been much ado about the decline of the public intellectual as a force in society. Populist heroes or at least demagogues have taken their place claiming a mandate from society as their authority rather than wisdom or scholarship. Closer examination shows that the history of intellectuals in general and public intellectuals in particular isn't very inspiring. Frances Stonor Suanders writes: Last week came an announcement from the University of London's Birkbeck College that it intends to establish a centre for public intellectuals. Its international director is to be Professor Slavoj Zizek... 'Political issues are too serious to be left only to politicians,' says Zizek. 'We need intellectuals - not to make decisions, but to make clear what the issues are about.' Trust for politicians being at an all-time low, it is tempting to believe him. But what exactly is a public intellectual? Unfortunately, Birkbeck doesn't tell us. There's some woolly stuff about...
December 03, 2004
Groupie Roundup
In the run up to the past US elections and during the immediate aftermath there was a lot of discussion about the narrow minded group-think of academics. Here are some recent additions to the growing body of commentary on the problem. Timothy Burke: Academics are not motivated to groupthink out of a loyalty to liberal causes, left-wing politics or registration in the Democratic Party, though in many disciplines at the moment, they may end up predominantly having those affiliations in a smug, uninterrogated manner. They’re motivated to groupthink by the institutional organization of academic life. The same forces that help academics to produce knowledge and scholarship are the forces which produce unwholesome close-mindedness and inbred self-satisfied attitudes. These forces would act on conservatives as well were we to magically remove the current professoriate and replace them with registered Republicans. They do act already on academics who operate in disciplines where certain kinds of political conservatism are more orthodox, or...
November 23, 2004
Science Opera
It's been called science wars but that doesn't seem quite apposite. It isn't that words are the only weapons, wars can be fought with words, but that it isn't a respectable, serious conflict so much as a theatrical adventure drama. In this scene John Holbo sings an aria accusing John Derbyshire of hypocrisy for pointing out that scientific progress is retarded and scientists are inhibited by fear of career damage when they have the temerity to study certain subjects that undermine liberal orthodoxy. Furthermore, if A and B both come from a population that has been breeding mostly among themselves for a few hundred years, while C comes from a different, remote population, it is very highly probable that you could discover this situation just by examining the three genomes. And now you know why the datanaut keeps his identity secret. He, or more precisely his website, has already been denounced as "bigoted" by one of those people who...
November 22, 2004
Hare Brained
The earlier post Blue Anti-Intellectualism could have been more properly titled academic anti-intellectualism since the focus was on how liberal orthodoxy in academic institutions had permeated them and become academic manners, the social reality of closed societies. The consequences of this for thought - false consensus, tendencies to extremism, etc. - and the consequences for society of having its youth sieved through such a warped filter were noted. This news article about a study of self reported voting by academics is illuminating. One of the studies, a national survey of more than 1,000 academics, shows that Democratic professors outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That ratio is more than twice as lopsided as it was three decades ago, and it seems quite likely to keep increasing, because the younger faculty members are more consistently Democratic than the ones nearing retirement, said Daniel Klein, an associate professor of economics at Santa Clara...
November 06, 2004
Anti-Intellectualism
The heart of Timothy's argument in the previous post, that "Bush is popular with some voters precisely because of his malapropisms, his anti-intellectual stance, because they see a resemblance to themselves and because that resemblance aligns them with him against educated elites" is echoed in this opinion piece by Frank Furedi in of all places The Scientist. The lack of cultural affirmation for the promotion of science has little to do with science as such. Among young people, the reaction against science and experimentation has not led to the establishment of alternative outlets for the development of intellectual curiosity. Previously, when young people became estranged from science, they turned to the humanities and liberal arts. Today's generation of students has adopted a distinctly pragmatic approach and is turned off by history, social theory, and philosophy as it is by science. The status of science is not merely at stake but also that of intellectual life in general. Ideas such...
October 22, 2004
The Bad Seed
Timothy Burke has another useful post, further evidence that he is among the very few that I am aware of that are making valuable contributions to society at this time. He employs his considerable rhetorical skills to breathe life into insights that deflate the irrational exuberance of stridently politicized positions, and leave the reader better balanced rather than chuffed up to die fighting infidels. (What fun is that?) But by alternately fluffing both sides of the argument he keeps it interesting and perhaps more effective, softening hard heads so that insights can penetrate and creating a little space for them to lodge and perhaps grow. He's a teacher as well as a thinker. His subject is the class war, or perhaps culture war, currently raging in the US. His take home point is that both sides have sinned and that we are diminished by the polarity. This may seem to be an obvious insight that many have voiced before...
October 17, 2004
Anti-Globalization
The primary refuge of the rag-tag post-socialist left is among various sects of monkey-wrenchers collectively self described as the anti-globalization movement. They aren't actually opposed to globalization, they are opposed to capitalism and liberty, but they try to conceal their true agenda since trying to sell an authoritarian program that denies self rule and local decision making didn't work well in the past and has no chance now that the world has had ample opportunity to observe those societies that suffered socialist revolution and subsequent collapse after decades of misery. One of the reasons that those closed societies collapsed was that information from the free world leaked in despite state censorship and attempts at information control. Weakened by bad governance their oppressed populations longed for release. A pair of blue jeans or training shoes weren't just clothing, they were information bombs that communicated the stark differences between controlled and free societies. The same is true of popular music and...
September 28, 2004
Doofus Alert
Some stuff seems just too stupid to comment on, but a number of bizarre public behaviors in recent months highlight the fact that really stupid stuff has an audience, in spite or perhaps because of the stupidity, and that it may sometimes be worthwhile to belabor the obvious. So, consider these archaic ideas that are still being touted as prescriptions for current policy: We need to communicate to everyone in the world a new story of our planet's destiny, showing them a better way to live than our bankrupt and ruinous 'civilization' way. We need to achieve a huge consensus that overpopulation and overconsumption are the two root causes underlying all the problems we face today, and agree on deadlines and targets for correcting them. We need to organize six billion people to use their collective wisdom to tell us how to meet these deadlines and targets, and then free them to work in their communities to make it...
July 30, 2004
Ungrateful Living
Many previous posts have refuted the analysis, conclusions, prescriptions and methods of doom mongers. The main defect in methodology is to seek to control systems so as to force them to conform with an ideal, the cybernetic blunder first discussed here in Mental Tools. The main defect in prescription is that systems should be changed to match an ideology, overlooking the value of the existing system. The main defect in conclusions is that systems are dysfunctional. But even if the conclusions, prescriptions and methods of doom mongers were improved they would still be unhappy because they analyze by finding fault. Everything is faulty by some metric so there is an inexhaustible supply of them that can never be corrected. In a sense their goal is to justify their unhappiness and cause unhappiness for others who foolishly fail to grasp the coming doom. There's an almost humorous exercise in gloomiphilia (don't laugh, it's unseemly) in a recent book The Paradox...
April 22, 2004
TFT
One of the common failures of proselytizing believers in simplistic political systems is failure to understand human behavior, which is partly a result of poor observation skills and partly a result of poor reasoning skills. History is filled with such blunders. The ones in Europe, beginning with the French revolution, still bleed. A rudimentary understanding of human behavior would have allowed those French revolutionaries to see that the result of their bloody tantrum would be Napoleon and nearly two centuries of continental war. Cooler intellects anticipated the ensuing chaos and warned the world, but few listened. The problem persists. This Wired article about video games lauds what they mistakenly characterize as teaching tools for cooperation. September 12th isn't like other games. Because when a missile shot at Arab terrorists kills an innocent bystander in the game's fictional Afghani village -- and it's nearly impossible not to -- other villagers run over, cry at their loss and then, in a...
March 18, 2004
Unanimous Fallacies
Conservation News links to this Jared Diamond article which asserts that "The parallels between Easter Island and the modern world are chillingly obvious". Diamond has been flogging this idea about for a few years and it hasn't improved with time. The collapse of society on Easter Island when their Polynesian culture proved unsuitable to the small and isolated island on which this band of immigrants landed has provoked speculation ever since it was discovered by Europeans in 1722, approximately 800 years after discovery by Polynesians. Diamond cites ideas by Heyerdahl and von Däniken that supported their respective grand theories of human development. Diamond has one too but it isn't convincing, not even for Diamond. Thanks to globalization, international trade, jet planes, and the Internet, all countries on Earth today share resources and affect each other, just as did Easter's eleven clans. Polynesian Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean as the Earth is today in space. When...
February 13, 2004
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