May 08, 2008
Venal Truthiness
The real war on science. On April 30, U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken ordered the Interior Department to decide by May 15 whether polar bears should be listed under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act. Professor J. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School says, “To list a species that is currently in good health as an endangered species requires valid forecasts that its population would decline to levels that threaten its viability. In fact, the polar bear populations have been increasing rapidly in recent decades due to hunting restrictions. Assuming these restrictions remain, the most appropriate forecast is to assume that the upward trend would continue for a few years, then level off. “These studies are meant to inform the US Fish and Wildlife Service about listing the polar bear as endangered. After careful examination, my co-authors and I were unable to find any references to works providing evidence that the forecasting methods used in the reports had...
May 03, 2008
Barmy Brits
I've commented in the past that I was worried about the Brits, that they didn't seem to be in touch with reality. It's not that I know much, this is truly rootless bloviation, but they seemed to have contracted a virulent case of Euro disease, an affliction that affects the mind and leads to increasingly tenuous connections with reality along with heightened passions: agitated delusions. Then war breaks out. Perhaps I was too pessimistic. "If someone drops litter, they should be arrested," Livingstone threatened during his campaign, thinking his resolve would impress rather than infuriate voters with its ecologically correct pettiness in a city otherwise awash in real crime. Every tax and intrusion imposed by Labour in recent years was justified as being for voters' "own good." Ending global warming, reducing carbon footprints, lowering carbon emissions and raising public funding of renewable energy — all were excuses used to hit the voters' pocketbook with more taxes. Yet none of...
March 28, 2008
Big Daddy
One of the virulent maladies that afflicts the rag-tag remnants of the post-socialist left is extreme authoritarianism. This matters since nothing is more antithetical to core leftist principles than this. Worse, it's a cult-like form of authoritarianism, almost papist or monarchist in tone and scope, that seeks to elevate some mortal to diety status as religious as well as statist leader. Barack Obama's speech on the financial crisis was a remarkable breakthrough. . . Astounding! I wish I had written the speech. It is this kind of leadership and truth-telling that is the predicate for the shift in public opinion required to produce legislative change. A radical, appropriately nuanced, and deeply public-minded description of what has occurred, the speech was Roosevelt quality: the president as teacher-in-chief. Rank rubbish. The president is not the teacher, or parent, or even leader. He heads one of three co-equal branches of government, expressly designed to blunt the predations of any aspiring diety. An...
March 17, 2008
Kill Blue
Someone sent me an email commenting on a post. Comments are open here, so I conclude that the comment was not intended to be public. OK, but I can talk about the ideas in the email without breaking confidence. I'd prefer that comments be made public. There's little to fear. The only uncivil whacko that comments here is me. If you can send email, then you can post in comments. The email quibbled with the idea that the voters of Michigan and Florida had control over the structure of their primaries, and so it could not be said that they must accept responsibility for the outcome. I replied that there were no voters anywhere at any time that had more control. Every contest has rules. Quibbling with the rules after the contest has been held is disingenuous. The time for that is before the contest. That doesn't mean that I approve of the particular rules, and even if I...
March 16, 2008
Mulligan
I suspect that one of the reasons that political parties and their candidates for office behave so irresponsibly is that they never accept responsibility for their actions. Norm points to this Jeff Weintraub post that clearly demonstrates not only that politicians don't accept responsibility, but that they are encouraged to evade it. As you all know, back in 2007 delegates from Florida and Michigan were excluded from this year's Democratic convention because those states broke the Democratic Party's rules by scheduling their primaries in January 2008. . . And at the time, no doubt, the rather draconian penalty imposed by the DNC may not have seemed like a big deal, since no one even considered the possibility that the nomination might still be contested when convention time rolled around. . . No solution at this point can be perfect, since much of the damage has already been done, and any effort to repair it after the fact is bound...
March 16, 2008
Last Word
A few weeks ago, briefly commenting on the Castro Kerfuffle, I quoted some old timers - Orwell and DeVoto - because the subject seemed so old and stale that it had all already been said. Easy for me to say, but I am aware that there are a great many people still struggling for some sort of clarity on these issues. Even the most cursory examination of Orwell and DeVoto shows that they lacked clarity too, and I freely admit that eveything I know is wrong, and have no idea what is right. I suspect that the best we can do is to gain some clarity about which things are more wrong than others. This David Mamet article, Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal', illuminates some of the same issues and fault lines as the Castro discussions, and has prompted many commentators to have a go. As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article...
March 04, 2008
Small L
Timothy continues to meditate about institutions and their discontents. Everything that works about institutional life rests on the habitus of professionals, bureaucrats, experts, on whether they are stewards or parasites, whether they recognize the fragile possibility of a better world or are just looting the till, whether they are humble in the face of wider and more distributed experience and knowledge or whether they are contemptuous of anything besides their own immediate power. We all know it: this is Arendt’s banality of evil. We do not need to fear the person at the top, but instead the mass force of institutional action. The libertarian answer, to sweep away all institutions (save those of private capital: a blind spot that I still find baffling), is no answer at all, any more than jumping off a cliff is a way to prevent being in an automobile accident. Once the world all knew that this was the danger we faced, after 1945...
January 10, 2008
Power Drinks
The illusion of action and competence is what politics is about. Offering a tangible plan that promises this tax incentive, that fact-finding commission, this reinvestment project, this funding for retraining doesn’t reach people who perceive the present as a slum left behind by a low-rent version of Benjamin’s angel of history. In fact, all it does is convince them that the candidate with the plans is one of those folks with his hands on the levers, one of them who always seems to come out on top. . . There isn’t a policy package that can straightforwardly address some of the underlying structural changes in the global political economy that affect Peoria as surely as they affect Shenzen. Your wonkish arms are too short to box with that god. I don’t think anyone is the master of these changes, even though some people and social classes and systems have way more power to direct what is happening than others....
December 23, 2007
Myopic Economics
The tunnel vision of punters like Clark (see previous post) isn't the only sight problem afflicting economists. Some are hopelessly short sighted. Checks and balances are all very well, but sometimes you have to wonder. The first session of the 110th Congress came to a close last week in a disorderly crush of half-baked legislation. It was the end of a year that gave the new Democratic leadership little to boast about. Seizing control of House and Senate in the 2006 elections, the Democrats had big ideas about holding the Bush administration to account, forcing a prompt withdrawal from Iraq and radically realigning the government’s domestic priorities. Measured against those early promises, their record has been dismal. . . The Democrats promised too much and now look foolish, but whose fault is the impasse – and who, if anyone, will pay the political price? The constitution is implicated, of course. It provides for this kind of thing, by equipping...
December 13, 2007
Poor Health
The closing thought in the earlier post Discontinuity lamented the degeneration of climate related concerns into low politics. The political epidemics that have repeatedly hammered Europe could spread to America. There are pools of infection on both coasts and some institutions are crippled. The media and academia are all but destroyed at this point. Lunatics roam the halls babbling nonsense. Things may get worse before they get better. The medicine we need now doesn't target any specific pathogen, it is a broad spectrum anti-politic. For example: The United States and the European Union remain at odds on many major points, including whether an agreement signed here should include numerical targets, a move that the United States and a few other countries, including Russia, oppose. The emerging economic powers, most notably China and India, also refuse to accept limits on their emissions, despite projections that they will soon become the dominant sources of the gases. The United States, Canada, Australia,...
December 08, 2007
Discontinuity
In the political contests seeking to use climate change as a wedge issue and power pony, the hysterics aren't the only ones stuck on stupid. The sceptics have also painted themselves into a corner. Based on the reasonable expectation that admitting a problem would lead to a huge government power grab, those conservatives with access to the biggest megaphones have used scientific uncertainty to avoid the issue. That game is just about up, and they suddenly find themselves walking unprepared into the middle of a sophisticated scientific and economic conversation about how to deal with the problem. While some conservative think tanks have considered these issues seriously for some time, the public discussion has been conducted up until now largely among various liberal factions and has turned into a technical debate about the most efficient tax scheme for reducing carbon emissions. There may have been short term political benefits for conservatives, but avoiding the issue is no more sensible...
November 06, 2007
Walkie Talky
Here's another attempt to explain IPCC politics to those who can't grasp the issues. To begin with, this appears to be the first time that the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to scientists for doing science, as opposed to engaging in advocacy or direct conflict mitigation. For example, the award also went to: Medicins Sans Frontieres in 1999; the International Campaign to Ban Landmines in 1997; the Pugwash Conferences (1995); and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in 1985. In other words, until now the Nobel Peace Prize has been clearly recognized as a political award. The award to the IPCC thus implies that the IPCC is not a predominately scientific, but is in fact a political process: the award equates the scientific study of climate change with political advocacy. In this, it positions climate change science -- indeed, environmental science as a whole -- as a normative exercise rather than a scientific process, especially with those...
October 30, 2007
Not Wrong, Crazy
It's an epidemic, like BDS but more so. An economist once dubbed “champion of choice” by The Guardian newspaper would like your employer to organise an exercise hour for you and your colleagues. Professor Julian Le Grand was once a social policy adviser who had the ear of Tony Blair. . . An unsympathetic reading of all this is that a respected policy wonk has lost the plot. But the professor’s prescriptions – and the libertarian paternalist philosophy behind them – make more sense than you might think. He is not crazy. He is just wrong. Behind all three schemes lies the same idea: to influence behaviour without restricting choice. If you want salty food, you can add salt. If you do not want to do jumping jacks with your colleagues, just sign the excuse note. If you want to buy cigarettes, no problem – just sign up for the smoker’s permit. The £200 fee and the doctor’s signature,...
October 30, 2007
What's Left?
I know, someone already trademarked that question, but there seems to be some confusion worth discussing. Pursuing pro-market reforms does not imply facing a trade-off between efficiency and social justice. In this sense, pro-market policies are “left wing”, if that means reducing the economic privileges enjoyed by “insiders”. ...If the European left wants to be able to say honestly that it fights for the neediest members of our society, it must adopt as its battle cry the pursuit of competition, reforms and a system based on meritocracy. My only complaint is that they write as if this is new. In fact, liberalism, meaning classical liberalism, has never been conservative. It began as a movement of the left against feudalistic, conservative insiders and it remains so today. Precisely. But, things have drifted quite a lot from that good beginning as some of the good liberals became "the insiders" - big business interests that function in ways similar to the old...
October 17, 2007
Sticky Regulation
Another problem I see with regulatory approaches to problems, in addition to the ratchet effect where regulation begets more regulation in an unstoppable cascade bringing heat death to society, is that they are so very hard to rescind. [T]here are many examples of market failure. And maybe you can do things to reduce government failure. But in the end, there is the issue of dynamics. Market failure tends to be self-correcting, because entrepreneurs have incentive to fix things. For government failure to be corrected, somebody needs the insight to know how to correct it and they need to overcome the political opposition to changing the system. In practice, the change does not happen. You cannot get rid of the mohair subsidy. Regulations not only create a need for more regulation, they are resistant to treatment, like bacteria that laugh off antibiotics, even though they degrade their hosts. Resorting to regulation is intellectual failure. It reveals a lack of knowledge...
August 24, 2007
Provincialism
It seems that those who know the least about journalism are journalists. I was disappointed to see that Mr. Frey's paper on political isolation didn't address other ways that politicians remove themselves from public criticism. The Bush Administration has given us several examples of such behaviour. From President Bush's noted reluctance to read newspapers, to Vice-President Cheney's refusal to set eyes on a television tuned to a station other than Fox News, to the dissent-quieting methods of the president's advance team, to the use of hand-picked, stovepiped intelligence in crafting policy, the current administration has shown a willingness not just to discount opposing viewpoints and contradictory evidence, but to pretend such things do not exist. These actions raise interesting economic questions. Why, for instance, would an administration choose to have less information than its political opponents? Familiarising oneself with opposing ideas needn't imply a change in policy; if anything, it might improve one's strategy for achieving desired goals. The...
August 23, 2007
Political Economics
Economists, like politicians and other activists, often engage in sterile debates about picayune issues instead of engaging with real issues. It appears that the Cato authors have misstated the first statistic. Consultation of the cited source seems to show not that an increase in efficiency leads to a 20 percent jump in vehicle miles traveled, but that roughly 20 percent of total energy savings from efficiency gains are lost to increased travel. That's quite a different point, implying that efficiency gains could have a significant impact on emissions. The second statistic applies to a different argument: that because emissions per gallon of gas vary substantially by the type and age of an automobile, a gasoline tax is a very inefficient way to reduce emissions. I absolutely agree that a direct tax on emissions would be preferable to a proxy levy on gasoline, but an emissions tax is not without its costs. Increasing gasoline taxes requires only the passage of...
June 27, 2007
Summer Weave
It's odd how I sometimes look at my recent posts and find a theme woven into them. It isn't that the theme is a surprise to me, something I hadn't realized was on my mind, as that the posts hadn't been intended to pursue that theme. In Politics is Odious Joe Klein's anemic examination of the witless and intolerant left was scorned. In For Example Vaclav Klaus' responds, as a rational and freedom loving person, to the sad reality that "the dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced". These are just a couple of posts from the front page here. There are many others. The closed minded intolerance of power politics, especially on the left, is more of a world threat than climate change. It is not only more destructive, it is pervasive, affecting every field of endeavor. And...
June 19, 2007
For Example
Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic and survivor of communism, has a penchant for deflating the pretensions of politicians, due at least in part to his past experiences with politics gone wild. In his view, Freedom, not climate, is at risk. In the past year, Al Gore’s so-called “documentary” film was shown in cinemas worldwide, Britain’s – more or less Tony Blair’s – Stern report was published, the fourth report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was put together and the Group of Eight summit announced ambitions to do something about the weather. Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced. The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda”. I feel the same...
June 07, 2007
Politics is Odious
As well as stupid. . . . the smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere. Anyone who doesn't move in lockstep with the most extreme voices is savaged and ridiculed—especially people like me who often agree with the liberal position but sometimes disagree and are therefore considered traitorously unreliable. Some of this is understandable: the left-liberals in the blogosphere are merely aping the odious, disdainful—and politically successful—tone that right-wing radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh pioneered. They are also justifiably furious at a Bush White House that has specialized in big lies and smear tactics. It's interesting to see left-wingers, at long last, examining themselves a bit. But this graf is nonsense. The left didn't become witless and intolerant in response to talk radio, they have always been this way. Both sides have always been as they are, but we now have...
May 02, 2007
False Credit
I'm as mystified by Bush supporters as I am by Bush critics. The latter are often deranged, but the former are coming to seem nearly as out of touch with reality. MORE BOGUS KYOTO HISTORY FROM REUTERS: "President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of Kyoto in 2001, arguing it would cost U.S. jobs and that it wrongly excluded 2012 goals for poorer nations such as China." Er, no. The U.S. refused to ratify Kyoto under President Clinton. We've been over this before. It's all spelled out in Wikipedia, even. Really, if Reuters can't get simple things like this right, why should we trust them for actual news? . . . UPDATE: The Anchoress is unhappy, with Bush: I’m starting to get really pissed off with the Bush Administration for their inability or disinterest in fighting their own battles. We should not have to be doing this over and over, setting the record straight again and again....
April 04, 2007
Bush Whacked
Speaking of political bias . . . I confess I am stonkered at the willingness to blame the Bush administration for being insufficiently active on Doha, since without the trade team's efforts, Doha would not be on life support; it would be dead. The Bush administration did everything but a fan dance to lure all parties back to the table after the catastrophe at Cancun, and while it has not gone as far on farm subsidies as anyone would like, this is widely regarded as driven by (Democratic and Republican) farm interests in Congress, not some failure on the administration's part. It does the administration no good to negotiate a treaty that can't be signed. How, exactly, would more efforts from the Bush administration have, say, overcome the farm interests in Congress, or the much more egregious European intransigence on the matter? While the bilateral deals are worse than multilateral deals, they are better than nothing, which unfortunately is...
February 18, 2007
KOBK
Kill Or Be Killed. It is argued that this was once a pressing concern and that it has shaped us. Politics is the Mind-Killer. People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed. Being on the right side of the argument could let you kill your hated rival! Life, sex, status, and wealth depended on proto-human pack politics? OK, but what has changed? Not much I say. We don't kill quite so quickly and freely in some places as we once did, but for the majority of humans -...
January 22, 2007
Staying Alive
Russell Roberts does a little myth busting. Andy Grove (who has helped transform the world and who I respect greatly) makes the following observation in a piece on energy policy in today's Wall Street Journal editorial page: The first question that needs to be examined is this: If business's task is to generate revenue and profits for its owners, what is the equivalent task for a nation and its government? But government can't have tasks. . . How can a diverse group of people with diverse interests have a task? . . . Imagine writing an editorial along these lines, reprimanding these companies for being short-sighted and only caring about staying in business or trying to make profits. We all understand that making profits is what businesses try to do. So why do we expect politicians to do something other than to try and stay in office? That's what they do. Don't ask politicians to do something they aren't...
January 09, 2007
Dark Principles
Robin Hanson comments on a recent political science paper. Margit Tavits shows that in "23 advanced democracies over a period of 40 years," voters rewarded political parties for changing economic positions, but punished parties for changing other social positions. "even those parties that make [social] policy adjustments that correspond to the preference shifts of voters lose votes." On pragmatic issues, voters value "getting things done." Policy shifts in this domain signal responsiveness to the changing environment and are likely to be rewarded. Principled issues, however, concern core beliefs and values. Any policy shift in this domain is a sign of inconsistency and lack of credibility, which is likely to lead to voter withdrawal. Alas, social science is built on the idea that better info can give better social policy; if voters interpret social policy changes as a lack of principles, rather than better info, it will be very hard for better info to induce better policy. Makes me want...
January 07, 2007
Abnegation
I've most often seen this word coupled with self, as in self abnegation, but a quick dictionary check indicates that self may be superfluous. Abnegation: renunciation of your own interests in favor of the interests of others. This notion has been rattling around in my noggin for a couple of days since I last checked out Nanette's TV to make sure it still worked. (See It's Not Noise for the back story). I leave the set tuned to The Science Channel, of course, to reduce mental damage. I caught the very end of a show investigating what makes humans unusual compared to other animals. There had apparently been a number of candidate ideas explored earlier in the show but it ended with the idea of suicide as being a uniquely human behavior - especially the genetic suicide of failure to breed for ideological reasons. It wasn't a compelling thesis. A chorus of evolutionary biologists in my mind raised objections...
December 30, 2006
Political Failure
Perhaps I should go netless more often. Reading a lot of material in a short time in order to catch up, rather than in drips and drabs as it is produced, allows cross blog and media discussions to be more easily followed as a thought thread. Maybe. It isn't that this is difficult in any case, it just has greater impact when done in one swell foop. There's been a focus on bias and delusion lately. It isn't that this wasn't an important topic all along, but since the Overcoming Bias boys have assembled as a crew and launched their blog there has been increased discussion. Old material as well as new has been brought to bear on selected topics. This recent Arnold Kling post, Political Beliefs and Self-Deception, includes a couple of issues that have interested me for some time: expertise and political failure. The post is mainly a pointer to, and quote pulled from, this oldish paper...
November 03, 2006
Dueling Narratives
Timothy and I have been having an interesting (to me) discussion about the ideas presented in He Needed Killin' (thanks Tim!) - the notion that our gentrified societies have a sordid past and that this may be an unavoidable phase of social development. It's an unsettling notion, not obviously true but intriguing none the less. That it is factually so for many developed societies, they did have such phases, doesn't prove that it is necessary for all societies. And it's important to emphasize that such behaviors must always be refuted: the acts of individuals in societies in extremis can't be public policy, can't be institutionalized or pardoned, since that road leads to social pathology. Even if they are necessary crimes, they are still crimes that civil society must punish to avoid losing its soul. The relevant quote from the referenced article is that: Civil society cannot use the instruments of government to stamp out its mortal enemy—for that would...
October 26, 2006
Laws of Nature
If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. -- Sir Arthur Eddington You can't win. You can't break even. You can't get out of the game. Deal with it. But are natural laws the only givens? Of course politicians will look for any information or argument that they can find to advance their agendas -- that is their job. While politicians may not be above playing loose with scientific truth, more often they can and will simply search out -- and find -- a legitimate expert or two who can marshal...
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 16, 2006
Enviro-Media Complex
Environmentalism is a hustle - entertainment at best, parasitism at worst . . . like politics. Here's a pathology of natural resource advocacy. Michael Pollan article The Vegetable-Industrial Complex in the October 15th New York Times describes an example of Holling’s pathology of natural resource management in agriculture. Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution — the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops — and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot. Rather than return to that elegant solution, however, industrial agriculture came up with a technological fix for the first problem — chemical fertilizers on the farm. As yet, there is no good fix for the second problem, unless you count irradiation and Haccp plans and overcooking your burgers and, now, staying away from...
October 04, 2006
Hysteria Tradition
Nothing is more American, more democratic, than the free expression of senseless emotions. Shrieking hyperbole uninformed by reality is the very soul of democracy. This is both its strength and its weakness. Roger Pielke Jr. links an interesting article in The Scientist on the Bush Administration. It surveys the claims and counter claims that the Bush administration has meddled in science to an unprecedented degree, quoting Dan Sarewitz as well as Pielke, who both have taken positions a bit above the fray informed more by history than partisan bias, though neither are Bush supporters. It puts many of the most shrill claims in perspective and has some good information on funding levels - the ultimate cause of high levels on the shrill-o-meter - which have varied over time. We have spent less on physics in recent decades but more on life sciences, and under Bush this has been a tiny bit less pronounced - which is perceived by life...
July 23, 2006
Crypto-religion
One of the more nonsensical memes infecting public discourse is that America is diminished by the religious beliefs of a significant portion of the population. Americans have long been ambivalent about science. Conflicting attitudes toward science are not uncommon among industrialized countries—Canadians, Europeans, and Japanese, for example, also appreciate the benefits of science but worry about potential impacts on society. What sets Americans apart is that their reservations center primarily around religion. And now, as the United States struggles to maintain its undisputed position as world leader in science and technology, religious ideology has spilled over into the public sphere to a degree unmatched in other industrialized societies. Religious groups are turning scientific matters like stem cells and evolution into political issues. Rubbish. All rubbish. The reservations of the other cited societies - Canadians, Europeans, and Japanese - also are religious. America is not different. The religions are different but in each case the reservations about science have a...
July 07, 2006
Can Humans Govern?
The Chairman at Maggie's Farm has some clarity on this question. Boston College Political Science Prof. Alan Wolfe has written a piece, Why Conservatives Can't Govern. It is an over-heated, hyperbolic, and fact-twisting anti-Bush rant (for just one example, he makes it sound as if K Street were a Repub thing - it's not. K Street just follows the influence - they don't care who it is) rather than a calm, thoughtful essay, but he does have some good points. A quote: If government is necessary, bad government, at least for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have been exceptionally good at showing just how bad it can be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad government--indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government--is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do...
April 25, 2006
Persuasive Pass Time
Richard Hamming: on how to do great research. [via Structure+Strangeness] Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance. But most great scientists are well aware of why their theories are true and they are also well aware of some slight misfits which don't quite fit and they don't forget it. But, great scientists are very rare. It seems to me that great thinkers of all sorts share these mental habits, and that they are also very rare. Part of the problem may be that there are often great rewards for being "sooners", for jumping the starting gun and making premature commitment to dodgy theses. Becoming a believer and...
April 18, 2006
Type M Sleaze
In Scientific Consensus or Religious War? Arnold Kling posts again about the degraded nature of public discourse, in this case about climate change. He first argues for the wisdom of listening to dissenting views since in the past they have sometimes turned out to be right even though they were lonely voices in the wilderness only a short while before. Then he notes the increasing use of "Type M" arguments, those that evade substance and focus on the presumed motives of opponents, painted as luridly as possible. In economics in the 1960's, there was a "scientific consensus," embedded in sophisticated macro-econometric models, that inflation reflected a competition over income shares, and that government policies to interfere with wage- and price-setting were the solution. Milton Friedman's contrary views were outside the "scientific consensus." By 1985 or so, the "scientific consensus" had shifted, in part because policies based on that consensus were tried in the 1970's, leading to the worst macroeconomic...
March 15, 2006
Dark Siders
We expect exaggeration, selective use of data and out right lies from activists and politicians. They are marketing people selling everything, including their souls, in part for beliefs and in part for personal advantage. But it's different, worse, when scientists do it since their sole claim to legitimacy is truth seeking. As noted in Social Dunces there's a problem with this view since scientists are often merely marketing people too. . . . this incarnation of geoengineering is such a hot potato that scientists cannot even agree whether it should be discussed publicly. "The knowledge that we maybe could engineer our way out of climate problems inevitably lessens the political will to begin reducing carbon dioxide emissions," observes David Keith from the University of Calgary in Canada. Lessens political will! Isn't political will supposed to be informed? Does it have any value, much less legitimacy, when it is based on ignorance and lies from "authorities"? As outrageous as the...
February 06, 2006
Almost Sensible
David Roberts, dark-sider who posts at the Gristmill blog - sometimes seems to almost rise above his biases and activism to reason in good faith. Almost. Bush's SOTU statement that "America is addicted to oil" was treated as the Big News of the speech, as though he'd admitted to some deep dark secret. . . But it strikes me as an extraordinarily poor way of describing the problem. . . The subtext of America being "addicted" is that the American people are somehow fallen and weak. But America does not rely on oil by virtue of any moral failing. It is not a weakness. It's simple prudence: For quite a long time now, oil has been an incredibly cheap, incredibly concentrated source of energy. It turns out that burning it is screwing up our atmosphere, and it's going to run out soonish, and it props up politically detestable regimes, so yeah, we need to start phasing it out. Circumstances...
January 28, 2006
Rationally Ignorant
I read these Arnold Kling posts 1,2,3 about Bryan Caplan's work and forthcoming book. So here's my offer: If I use the title you suggest, I'll take you to lunch at Morton's (Tyson's Corner or Reston, your pick). I meant to develop and apply the ideas to things that have been said here - more politics is stupid ammunition - but didn't get it done. Marcelino Fuentes at Biopolitical posted about it and said some things well. To attract votes, politicians promise policies that are popular instead of optimal. So democracy delivers bad policies. The alternative is not dictatorship, which usually works much worse, but individual decision-making and responsibility. Educating voters or cleaning up the campaign finance mess will not work. In classical public choice theory voters are rationally ignorant because they lack incentives to inform themselves. Learning about policy is costly, the probability that anyone's vote will affect the outcome of elections is negligible, and the costs of...
January 07, 2006
Bunkerism
The idea of "energy security" is nonsense but it sells well in Peoria. Those who don't understand economics and global commodities have the mistaken notion that it is possible for some country, any country, to withdraw from world trade in energy by some magical combination of energy scams that promise to provide self sufficiency within a geographic area. The idea of energy isolationism is one of those strange bedfellows fantasies, like the alliance of doctrinaire libertarians and loony leftists against agricultural subsidies, that in this case brings together neo-conservative islamophobes and pseudo-environmentalists, those who use environmental issues as political wedges to advance authoritarian agendas but don't really give a fig about the environment other than an emotional need to appear pious on green religion. The earlier posts Green Accounting, Rain Dance and Off Broadway discussed these silly ideas from several perspectives. But since this snake-oil is attractive to shallow thinkers there are still opportunists fleecing the marks and it...
January 03, 2006
Not Democracy
Another politics is stupid post. In this one Jonah Goldberg is confused about democracy. [via Prometheus which is in heavily qualified agreement with Goldberg] Liberal democracy ceases to exist when partisanship vanishes. Democracy is about disagreement before it is about agreement. This doesn't justify partisanship, it speaks against it since there are so many ways to disagree about a subject. Partisanship is where gangs of thugs mob together to punch above their weight. Liberal democracy is quite different. It is what happens when those who disagree listen to one another and realize that to have a functional society it is necessary to avoid alienating large numbers through the exercise of majoritarian power. It isn't that the thugs can be potty trained, there are always those who evade socialization and behave rudely. Indeed, when you mention their bad behavior they throw a tantrum: When you hear people say, "We need to get past partisan differences," what they are really saying...
December 23, 2005
Another Pattern
Politics is stupid. It impedes good governance, effective policy making, and useful thought. It even lowers IQ. I've said all these things in the past year and as time goes on it seems ever truer. Recently in a discussion with Tim Worstall I said: I had a thought today while I was bucking 4 tons of hay into the barn. You tend to think about anything but what you are doing at times like that so that you don't simply quit and do something more rational and less painful. Politics is like a fist fight in the stands between hooligans while the game is being played on the field. The fist fight has a tenuous connection to the game, but it is not the game. It can in extreme cases affect the game, but never in a useful way. It changes the nature of the experience for observers, even sometimes comes to dominate their experience. That's a mistake, though...
November 29, 2005
Lost In Space
Sometimes I read a post and wonder what these folks are talking about since it makes no sense at all. Often I find that they simply didn't know what they were talking about, had misunderstood some event and gone off on an unrelated tangent exercising one of their bedraggled hobby horses. Once I've untangled the unrelated threads each makes some sense, though not what those who commented had in mind. Norm me-toos a Mick Hartley post that misunderstood a Stephan Pollard article which questioned a BBC news show. (How's that for a chain of references!). Working back, the beeb showed Paul McCartney viewing some PETA footage from China in which some cats and dogs were handled roughly during slaughter. McCartney called for a complete boycott of China in retaliation. Pollard thinks McCartney has his priorities confused. China imprisons and executes thousands of dissidents who dare to criticise the regime. Sixteen years after the protest in Tiananmen Square dozens of...
November 09, 2005
Paris Is Burning
And there are as many theories about why this is so as there are pundits. . . OK, more. I found this Frank Furedi article to be thoughtful. After dismissing several other explanations (economic, yada yada) he proposes his theory. The most significant thing about recent events in France is not the behaviour of the rioters, but the reaction of the political class and official authority. The Bush regime's response to the flooding of New Orleans looks positively energetic when compared with the sense of paralysis and confusion that seems to have gripped French officialdom. During the first week of the unrest, French politicians devoted their energies mainly to scoring points against one another. Nero fiddling away while Rome burned seemed to serve as a role model for the French Cabinet. For a whole week, President Jacques Chirac literally withdrew from the public domain and said nothing. . . This reluctance publicly to address the issue at stake is...
October 18, 2005
Political Disease
One of the current foci of political agitation is flu. Political activists, after having exploited hurricanes for a few weeks, have switched focus now to a possible flu epidemic as the vehicle for advancing their same old agenda. Consider this artillery barrage: Earlier this month, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan suggested patent rules might be suspended in an outbreak to allow other companies to make generic forms of Tamiflu, produced by Swiss-based Roche Holding AG. In recent days, a company in India announced plans to do that. However, [U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike] Leavitt said the United States supports intellectual property laws that bar such action. Tamiflu has a shelf life of five years. The threat of a flu epidemic is older than that yet there has been no effort by governments to do the most sensible thing and stockpile it before the threat became immanent. Their purchases all along would have been all the stimulus needed to...
September 13, 2005
Sleaze Balls
Here's another example of the sort of muddled thinking that results from thinking of politics rather than of governance. It isn't just that it silly or mean spirited nonsense, it is also that the political thinker is unable to make useful analyses of situations and actions. [via Notional Slurry] But the diehard Bush shills (no bit of right-wing sliminess is beneath them, it is said) are busy blaming the local officials. (Ask yourself: supposing there really were, say, 200 school buses available, how would that have made possible the evacuation of 100,000 people from New Orleans?) Sliminess? That seems as abundant on the left, as evidenced here, as the right. I agree, they are both slimy. The fact is that the perpetually corrupt NOLA political establishment did blunder horribly. The fact is that FEMA was not prepared to deal with a real disaster, especially one that took place in such a corrupt and poorly governed place. Politicians on both...
September 07, 2005
Monolithic Fantasy
Robust, resilient systems are never monotonous. They're not even efficient. They never come in first, or last, and can stand a lot of punishment without collapse. The earlier post After The Flood included a brief paean to systems that may not be tidy but are resilient and referred to the "small minded prig who sees the spotty failures and longs to eliminate the clutter and make everything right. His whole objective is to eliminate those failures though they are in truth among the most valuable parts of the system. In his longing for neatness and order he creates tragedy. It isn't that the small failures are desired, or that they are not lamented since real people suffer, it's that there is less suffering that way." So who are these prigs, let them speak for themselves! Faster Katrina Recriminations Blame federalism! . . . As long as we're apportioning blame in the Katrina fiasco, here's another culprit: federalism, by which...
September 07, 2005
Save British Ale
In the discussion with Timothy Burke following the post Flesh Wounds - and other places too, it was a somewhat peripatetic conversation - my view that politics is a distraction from and impediment to governance, that politicians are necessarily unethical, and that those who focus on politics fail to do useful analysis or make sensible choices puzzled Timothy. He says: I'm really just puzzled by the degree to which you think that everyone else who is interested in "politics" in some way that you are not must be operating from hidden motives, bad-faith instrumentalisms, superficialities, rather than long-established, internally consistent and principled arguments with which you happen to seriously disagree. The latter wouldn't bother me for a minute. The former, as a fairly blanketing and generic assumption, bothers me intensely and seems deeply contradictory to the specificity and depth of many other postings. This post isn't a response to Timothy's puzzlement (not that I accept his characterization), I'm still...
March 10, 2005
Left Out
In addition to the naive and self serving nonsense we've heard about why Democrats have gotten thumped so often and for so long there is a more honest and thoughtful body of work. The recent post of Timothy Burke that I've pointed to a couple of times already, Down In the Dumps, where he explains why he speaks plainly and sincerely about issues that interest him rather than avoiding subjects that might damage his liberal causes, and won't resort to lies and political strategies, is one example. I write as a liberal sack of garbage not because I think that I am writing to Gentlemen and Ladies on the other side, and thinking they accord me the same respect. I write it because the only way to win a rigged game is to play fair and hope that the onlookers will eventually notice who cheats and who does not. I write as a sack of garbage because I believe...
February 20, 2005
Mobocracy
The earlier post Extremists took issue with the naive and mean-spirited corruption of the idea of democracy advocated by reactionaries upset by consensual rule, especially in the US. Their objective is to incite mobs to use ICT to dominate society and disenfranchise as large a segment of society as possible. In Downloading Democracy Robert Conquest deals with an aspect of this issue worth highlighting. Its faults are almost as obvious as its virtues. And examples are many--for instance, the sentencing of Socrates, who lost votes because of his politically incorrect speech in his own defense. Or the Athenian assembly voting for the death of all the adult males and the enslavement of all the women and children of Mytilene, then regretting the decision and sending a second boat to intercept, just in time, the boat carrying the order. Democracy had the even more grievous result of procuring the ruin of Athens, by voting for the disastrous and pointless expedition...
November 09, 2004
God Bothering
Ken MacLeod's reaction the the US elections, like many others, starts with perplexity, then shows the flag and expresses solidarity with the losers, and ends by trying to say some sensible things. Perplexity: The Conservative and the Communist sometimes find they have more in common than either might have expected; at least that they understand each other, and agree on what is important; likewise the Freethinker and the Fundamentalist. In politics as in religion, both poles are perplexed by the Liberal; from opposite sides of the case they scratch their heads, like Victorian biologists looking at a platypus and wondering if they aren't being made a monkey of. That's how I feel sometimes. I love you guys, but I don't understand you. Add to this that I have a tin ear for US politics, and my qualifications for commenting on last week's election, and giving my liberal friends tips on how to warm their eggs and suckle their young...
November 06, 2004
False Assumptions
In a series of posts and an external essay Timothy Burke grapples with the US election results trying to understand why the Democrats lost and how they might recover from their decades long slide into increasing irrelevance and political powerlessness. I find his work useful but I think it suffers from false assumptions. In his most recent post he abstracts arguments from his essay for further emphasis. Quite a few commentators have observed 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. The reverse is equally true. A lot of us who voted for Kerry are astonished that the simple competence issue didn't carry the day by itself. What I have realized is that seeking competency and a respect for institutional process are cultural values that are parochially confined to educated elites. They're part of...
November 04, 2004
Bad Idea
In a comment by Timothy Burke about a Mindles H. Dreck post at AI Timothy said: If you ask people to remember and respect large pluralities of people who think differently than they do, then you have to ask that across the board. One of my objections to the Bush Administration and many of their most ardent supporters is that they show zero inclination to consider any opposing views. I feel little desire to "unite behind the President" since he has shown no interest whatsoever to take any of my views, interests, beliefs or knowledge seriously. But it would be fair to say that much of the opposition to Bush would do the same were they in power. If you find that a lamentable state of affairs, then lament it even-handedly, and work to change it. We would need a model of political process that regarded radically diverse or pluralistic convictions with respect, and tried to incorporate them into...
November 02, 2004
Newspeak
Several previous posts have talked about how those who cling to old ideas, the steam age industrial ideas of the past couple of centuries, try to tart up those old ideas with new language to pass them off as new ideas. In a comment about a previous post, Modest Praise, which softly complimented Nicole-Ann Boyer for her recognition of the work of C.S. Holling, Nicole herself asks: "I'm curious, though, what you find wrong with the Worldchanging approach?" Here is an example: We are not a partisan site -- not because we don't have a variety of strongly held political views, but because we're trying here to be part of creating a different kind of conversation about the future: a conversation more about solutions than problems, more about collaboration than conflict, more about tools than talking points, more about the tomorrow's planet than today's politics... A billion people now live in conditions of appalling poverty. What can we can...
October 28, 2004
Fallibilist Philosophy
'He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.' -- Friedrich Nietzsche A thought thread woven through previous posts deals with the conflicting world views of those who seize upon an idea and become zealous proponents of it - taking it to extremes and so losing any value the original idea may have had - and those who maintain a critical stance, even of their own ideas, and so avoid turning them into dogma or caricature. The excitable extremists ride their notions into the ground and end up walking, or crawling, while the more critical not only keep their mounts they do better at choosing routes among the various turnings and forkings of paths. It's not just a difference in temperament. There's an element of personal integrity and intellectual honesty involved as well as courage. When uncertainty or doubt...
October 23, 2004
Patooie Spirit
Michael Blowhard writes: It isn't often that I run across a political quote I can get entirely behind, but I think I may have found one today. I'm still kicking it around, but the more I do the solider the thinking in this quote feels. Benjamin Disraeli: In a progressive country change is constant; and the great question is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, the traditions of the people, or in deference to abstract principles and arbitrary and general doctrines. A little before that Michael wrote: I'm thinking about politics' place in life. I'm prone to such feelings as, "Sheesh, if only we could do without." And the people I'm temperamentally prone to be most suspicious of are those who approach politics with gusto. What's the matter with them? In any case, as far as I'm concerned, politics...
October 19, 2004
Thingism
Not to be confused with chosisme. SIAW links to a previous post, Anti-Globalization, with mild interest and some reservations. In their attempt to properly label me they make this assertion: Jones makes it very clear very early on that his perspective is not one that could be called leftist. He characterises socialism, for example, as “a primitive idea formed during the early years of industrialisation, harking back to an earlier time rather than usefully anticipating probable futures”, and says that “its central tenet [is] world domination” (when we all know that our ultimate aim is domination of the entire Milky Way, eh, Cde Posadas?). Is socialism all there is to leftism? What is socialism? There are a wide variety of answers and the smaller the distinction the more virulent the dispute. At a high level it is political control of economic life, a seemingly horrible notion justified by an even more horrible history of lack of control. It hasn't...
October 16, 2004
Evolution
Here's an interesting example of old and new media; Carl Zimmer has a review of Richard Dawkins' newest book, The Ancestor's Tale, in NYT and a blog post to say things that didn't fit in the print version. It's a review of a book about evolution, in a partially evolved form, one of those missing links so prized when found in the fossil record, like a proto-cetacean with legs not fully readapted to life in the sea after a long evolutionary history on land. The form is interesting but so is the content. The blog post, The Missing Foe, ruminates about the fact that Dawkins' book didn't mention Stephen J. Gould, his long time antagonist. Here's the most important thing about The Ancestor's Tale that I couldn't fit in my review. I kept noticing how little Richard Dawkins mentioned the other celebrity evolutionary biologist of our time, Stephen Jay Gould. After all, Gould was a prominent character in many...
October 14, 2004
Uncomprehending
William Gibson is one of those hollow writers that doesn't grasp his subject while none the less having the insight to choose interesting subjects and write ripping good tales about them. This recent blog post is an example of this. ... he introduced me to several new ideas (mainly the "netwar" paradigm of warfare, which is genuinely a new paradigm in the Kuhnian sense, and which I'll return to in a later post). I came away feeling highly optimistic about, of all things, the US military..."asymmetric conflict with amorphous networks of terrorists, who repurpose civilian technologies to terrible ends" was going to be where it was at from now on... In the days after 9-11 I often took comfort in thinking of this man and the ideas he represented... I surprised friends by saying that I believed the US military's intelligentsia already understood the true nature of the conflict better than the enemy did. One actually has to be...
October 06, 2004
Bi-Polar Whingeing
A curious phenomenon of US elections is the idea that citizens of other countries, though unable to govern themselves sensibly, should have influence in US elections. They argue that since the US affects them that they should have a voice. Should the US then have a reciprocal voice in their affairs? They don't speak of that directly but of course this is their true agenda, the majoritarian nightmare discussed in the earlier post Extremists. They wish to have a single world government. The fact remains that this election will have a material impact on the rest of the world, especially people living overseas. We do feel the brunt of these foreign policies in direct and indirect ways. I can no longer travel as care-free and safely to the places I once could just five years ago. The degrees of freedom in terms of my personal business have narrowed considerably. And this lack of say, this powerlessness to exercise my...
October 05, 2004
Trick Questions
In the comments of the earlier post Compared to What? there was some discussion of why some people support Bush, even some that didn't vote for him in 2000 or vote for Republicans in general. In a new post Timothy Burke, a key participant in that earlier discussion, has more to say. I still don’t understand fully the other part of the solidly pro-Bush constituency that I encounter online and in everyday life. It’s not so much irrational as arational in my reading. I don’t understand where it’s coming from in social terms--it seems rather heterogeneous and distributed--or whether it is in fact a structurally immobile, deeply fixed political posture whose terms draw from something prior to and unaffected by conjunctural political thought or experience. It doesn't seem economically or politically self-interested to me in the way that Thomas Frank argues it is (I have been thinking a lot about Frank lately, but Michael Berube has said most of...
September 08, 2004
Compared To What?
I observe political contests for the most part with detached curiosity, finding all sides a bit repellent and their actions mainly destructive. Politics is not about governance and is usually antagonistic to good governance. While it is clear that societies must govern themselves to achieve desired outcomes, and that since there are differing views some type of decision making system must exist to resolve disputes on a pragmatic and provisional basis, the best methods yet devised fall far short of adequacy. Representative democracy with a variety of constitutional hobbles to blunt fanaticism, buffer mood swings and preserve subsidarity is a theoretically decent solution made much less effective in practice by political advocacy and conflict. Though not deeply interested in the details of political contests at either the practical and strategic levels of particular contests, such as the current US presidential elections, or the more theoretical and ideological level of historical trends, I do follow a couple of sharp pundits...
August 29, 2004
More Science Politics
Huge amounts of money are spent on scientific research, much of it by governments. Government funding is politicized, an unavoidable problem that manifests in various ways depending on the socio-political system. Opportunists of various stripes continuously maneuver for advantage, increasingly by making shrill accusations that their political opponents are doing the same. These pot and kettle contests would be humorous if the issues weren't important. The previous post Science Politics refuted the somewhat muddled advocacy of Lawrence Lessig's Wired article Stamping Out Good Science which repeats the hollow idea that philosopher kings of some sort should control science funding, regardless of public concern or minority objections, for the good of society. It's the father knows best approach, an idea that some developed societies rejected a few decades ago after taking a close look at father's previous work. There is one region where science funding has the worst of both approaches, a father-knows-best system that it completely politicized. Ask a...
March 20, 2004
The We Problem
The earlier post The President's Council discussed the partisan flap over the actions of the President’s Council on Bioethics. That post dealt with an aspect of a larger theme often discussed here, the failure of putatively progressive ideas in the past few decades, especially those relating to technology and the environment. This New Atlantis article by Wilfred M. McClay, one of several in the Winter 2004 issue that reflect on a report entitled Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness issued by the President’s Council on Bioethics in October 2003, speaks of the anti-democratic nature of "Progressivism". Although Progressivism had various aspects, one of its chief features was its optimistic faith in the power of disciplined intellect to reorder society, and free it of the inefficiencies, inequities, and pathologies that beset it. A powerful and active government was the chief means through which the disciplined intellect could act upon the world, and the burgeoning research universities were the...
March 02, 2004
The President's Council
It seems that another politicized and deceptive article about science funding appears every day. This AP article published by Wired News is an example. This one complains about a change in personnel on the President's Council on Bioethics. Two of the eighteen members changed. The two who left were outspoken advocates of stem cell research funding by the government. The AP article quotes the ever vocal Union of Concerned Scientists as critics as well as opposition presidential candidates. The UCS is an organization of politicized scientists with such prescient members as Paul Ehrlich, the buffoon who spent his life predicting doom for the world and being publicly humiliated by the failures of his predictions which are all long past their sell-by date. What makes this politicized flap so silly is that nothing is at stake but federal funds. It isn't as if stem cell research is inhibited. Non-federally funded institutions are proceeding with stem cell research and new research...
February 19, 2004
Waffling with Dignity
A good example of the politicized state of science policy which has existed for decades and is only now being challenged can be found in this brief and thoughtless NYT article which accuses the Bush administration of politicizing science. The Bush administration has deliberately and systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad, a group of about 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, said in a statement issued today. The sweeping charges were later discussed in a conference call with some of the scientists that was organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent organization that focuses on technical issues and has often taken stands at odds with administration policy. The organization also issued a 37-page report today that it said detailed the accusations. What the writer, James Glanz, fails to mention is that the Union of Concerned Scientists is a radical...
February 15, 2004
The Unexamined Life
Jacob Levy at Volokh provides another example of the muddled thinking about science policy now so common. ...This isn't the first administration to meddle in scientific review processes for political purposes, but the current administration's version is particuarly worrisome. It's concentrated on public health in general and reproductive health in particular, interfering with the ability of public policy to deal honestly and competently with AIDS in particular. Now, strict libertarian principle (or even strict Rawlsian-neutralist liberal principles) might tell us that state funding of research is a bad idea, but doesn't give us any guidance as to how it should be structured if it exists. My view is something like this: if state funding of research is justified, it has to be because of the value of getting good science and good research. That requires that the programs, to have merit, have to be insulated as much as possible from political interference and left free to pursue good science....
January 19, 2004
Outdated Ideas
This interesting press release amplifies the ideas from the previous post. A person's genetic predisposition to develop heart disease and history of hypertension are just as important as gender and age when it comes to determining dietary needs, according to an article in Nutrition Today. "Individualization of Nutrition Recommendations and Food Choices," written by Lori Hoolihan, PhD RD, discusses how a person's biological make-up coupled with personal lifestyle choices are among the many considerations that contribute to nutrition recommendations; a trend that may significantly alter the way health professionals prescribe diets for patients. "Health professionals have been using family history of disease to determine their patients' risks for genetic diseases for years. Now, the science is getting to be such that health professionals will be able to recommend specific foods and nutrients for optimal health based on detailed patient profiles," states Hoolihan, research specialist for the Dairy Council of California. We know a lot more about livestock nutrition and health...
January 18, 2004
Grunts and Groans
This idiotic article from the groan is another example of the entirely political agenda behind the belated concerns with science noted in earlier posts, here and here. It is worth noting that this is a loony left broadsheet published in U.K., an embarrassment to thoughtful and sincere leftists, from a nation where science is totally subsumed by politics and has been so for a very long time. Professor Kaare Norum, leader of the World Health Organisation... tells of his grave concern over American opposition to the WHO's blueprint to combat obesity. He accuses the US of making the health of millions of young Americans 'a hostage to fortune' because it has failed to take action over the fat epidemic as a result of its business interests, particularly the sugar lobby. Since 1990, successive US governments have blocked WHO calls for action, claims Norum, professor of medicine at Oslo University. 'Obesity rates have risen so that now one in three...
January 16, 2004
Please darken my door
Notes and Comment expresses concern about the OMB peer review proposal and links this WaPo article. The administration proposal, which is open for comment from federal agencies through Friday and could take effect in the next few months, would block the adoption of new federal regulations unless the science being used to justify them passes muster with a centralized peer review process that would be overseen by the White House Office of Management and Budget. Administration officials say the approach reflects President Bush's commitment to "sound science." Notes and Comment expresses these concerns... Peer review is one thing, 'centralized' peer review is another, and 'centralized' peer review overseen by the White House Office of Management and Budget is quite, quite another. Which peers would those be, exactly? Centralized by whom? And - 'overseen' in what sense, using what criteria? One can guess all too easily. ...And quotes the WaPo article. But a number of scientific organizations, citizen advocacy groups...
December 10, 2003
Texas Floods
Norm has a new home. I hope this doesn't interfere with the interesting discussion via blog he's been having with Ken MacLeod regarding MacLeod's views on our current wars. It's a discussion I've been anticipating (and attempting to instigate) for months, one that contrasts opposing views held by careful and principled thinkers, each deeply knowledgeable and long immersed in social issues. UPDATE: 12/16/2003 Ken MacLeod has replied to Norm and Norm promises further response....
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