9 thoughts on “Matthew Yglesias”

1. It actually reminded me a lot of the conventional wisdom of space policy and launch costs.

   And anthropogenic global warming.

2. I’ve always thought of theoretics as an answer to the rise of government funding of academic research and publication. When you’re an english professor in 1949, watching the physics and engineering departments putting up new buildings you need some way to get to hook up with the gravy train.

   One bump on the path to grant money is that if the proposal is not obviously useful to the taxpayer in some way, then it must be obtuse enough or sound “smart” enough so it can’t be ridiculed by the hoi polloi – hence invent a new language that sounds like a science research proposal – featuring jargon, pseudo logical structures and re-definitions – then make sure that the people doing the grant approval know that, wink wink, your underlying purpose aligns with the agenda of the folks doing the grant approvals.

3. On the other hand, if an elected representative “votes their conscience” rather than for what they believe to be the best interest of their constituency, or perhaps even against the expressed will of their constituency, that’s not necessarily a moral act either. In a representative democracy, aren’t elected officials duty-bound to represent their constituents?

4. In a representative democracy, aren’t elected officials duty-bound to represent their constituents?

   That depends on the meaning of “represents.” If he is simply to be a stenographer, then he serves no purpose, because they could simply have a direct democracy. In a republic, he is supposed to represent their interests. If he doesn’t do that, he loses an election.

5. If he is simply to be a stenographer, then he serves no purpose, because they could simply have a direct democracy. Agreed, which is where I think political leadership comes in. A competent elected representative should be able to improve the outcome of the democratically expressed will of the people by providing expert analysis and recommendations. This process would at times necessarily involve persuading the constituency to make different choices than they might otherwise. One way to think of it is that the representative provides an “enlightened self-interest” function, which improves over the likely more gut-instrinct self-interest of a direct democracy. (I don’t mean to insult voters in general but most people simply don’t have the time to spend on politics that a full-time representative does, nor the expertise that comes with doing that job.)

   But, does this function properly include moral considerations of a strictly personal nature on the part of the representative? That is what I was questioning.

6. Physics and the other sciences have never been immune to this. Generations of scientists often seize upon some idea and cling to it, until the next generation overthrows it. That’s why the overthrowers are revolutionaries and are remembered forever. 100 years ago was the exact same way. Physics was *crazy* back then. 😀

7. Here’s the thing. There are two different ways of thinking about government here: I’m going to call them the High-End University way and the Rest Of The Country way. The High-End University way is to think people vote for the person they think can best give them things to do, tell them what they should be interested in, and in general guide them through life; the Rest Of The Country way is to think that people vote for the person who can best represents interests they already have and rein in the horse of government so that it heads down the path that they, the people, have already decided they want it to go. This is why academics are constantly being brought up short by the fact that us less educated peons don’t in fact want our hands held and our lives dictated by Mommy Government. (And note that academia is packed with people whose real-life response in childhood to “it’s for your own good” was to become cases of petulant arrested development; is the ivory tower’s pushing of the nanny state revenge on their parents for not letting them stuff themselves on sweets when they were children?)

8. Possibly people might want to read some of Yglesias’s columns before pointing out their failings? I know that’s a lot to ask, but for people professing literacy ….

9. As an aside on the Card story, I think Card exaggerates the issues with superstring theory. Sure as a theory that purports to explain the universe, it’s overblown hype. And the theory needs serious rigor which it probably won’t get for decades.

   But the people fiddling with this stuff keep coming up with interesting relationships. A simple case is the 10 or 26 dimensional structure that Card derides. There’s also the collapse of the superstring theory to 6 models and a more general theory (called “M theory”) that includes all those models as special cases. In other words, they found a lot of structure to something that wasn’t expected to have it. Finally, they’re hitting the occasional deep result in topology or geometry.

   Maybe it’ll be hopeless as a model for describing physical phenomena and mathematically bankrupt. But there is something interesting hiding in the murk.

   My view is that the reason it became popular so fast was exactly for the reason Smolin was interested. Namely, it seems to have application to a large area of theoretical physics (and later math). I imagine young researchers came to it in droves merely because it provided a huge opportunity for advancement. It was approved by leading researchers in physics and had all sorts of weird connections both to itself via symmetries (for example, “mirror symmetries” which in a sense relate thin, long tubes and short, wide tubes of strings) and fields in math. So plenty of valuable niches for new researchers to mine.

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