…in all the wrong places.
As he says, with Occupy, or what’s happening in Ferguson, the so-called “anarchists” are just the muscle for the Left.
Category Archives: Philosophy
Of Machines And Men
An interesting interview with Robin Hanson on brain emulation, AI, and the flaws of humanity.
Personal Identity
What is it, and how does it maintain its continuity from childhood on?
This is an issue with the transporter problem. If a copy of you is made, and then the original destroyed, is it “you”? Would “you” know the difference?
Privilege, Education And The Miracle Of The Socks
Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt on the privilege of the naive left.
I’m Not Religious, But I Don’t Hate Religion
I’m in George Will’s camp. His thoughts on baseball, God and ISIS.
Elon Musk And Mars
Babying Mars
Is it time to stop worrying about contaminating it?
As I’ve often said, wannabe Mars colonists’ biggest fear should be the discovery of indigenous life there.
Neil Tyson’s Latest
“Hey, you just have to trust me on all that stuff I made up“:
Eyewitnesses are a good thing. And if you believe Neil deGrasse Tyson is your lord and savior, his eyewitness testimony is of course sufficient for verifying, for instance, that George W. Bush quote.
But what about those of us who are not in the Tyson faith-based community? Are we “anti-intellectuals” to not trust in his unverified claims? I suppose that will be the continued approach by many in the media, some folks in the Wikipedia community (whose trust in Tyson puts the most devout religious piety to absolute shame), and the other fanboys.
I’ve never been as impressed with him as those who consider themselves my intellectual superiors have been demanding, but wow, he really is a piece of work.
[Update a while later]
Tyson finally admits that he botched the Bush quote:
Tyson claims to be a man of science who follows the evidence where it leads. The evidence here clearly shows Tyson screwed up. Whether knowingly or not, he regularly repeated a false account in order to cast aspersions on another public figure. The only proper thing to do is recant and apologize. That is what a person of integrity does.
I won’t be holding my breath.
Space Tourism
Is it being overhyped?
I fearlessly predict that, as with any other experience, some will be underwhelmed, and others will have their expectations exceeded.
In related news, tired of waiting, and fearing that they won’t get to the (arbitrary) von Karman line, some Virgin Galactic customers are demanding refunds.
[Update a few minutes later]
Richard Branson’s credibility is collapsing in the media.
What Is Science?
A useful essay:
…for all our bleating about “science” we live in an astonishingly unscientific and anti-scientific society. We have plenty of anti-science people, but most of our “pro-science” people are really pro-magic (and therefore anti-science).
This bizarre misunderstanding of science yields the paradox that even as we expect the impossible from science (“Please, Mr Economist, peer into your crystal ball and tell us what will happen if Obama raises/cuts taxes”), we also have a very anti-scientific mindset in many areas.
For example, our approach to education is positively obscurantist. Nobody uses rigorous experimentation to determine better methods of education, and someone who would dare to do so would be laughed out of the room. The first and most momentous scientist of education, Maria Montessori, produced an experimentally based, scientific education method that has been largely ignored by our supposedly science-enamored society. We have departments of education at very prestigious universities, and absolutely no science happens at any of them.
Our approach to public policy is also astonishingly pre-scientific. There have been almost no large-scale truly scientific experiments on public policy since the welfare randomized field trials of the 1990s, and nobody seems to realize how barbaric this is. We have people at Brookings who can run spreadsheets, and Ezra Klein can write about it and say it proves things, we have all the science we need, thank you very much. But that is not science.
Modern science is one of the most important inventions of human civilization. But the reason it took us so long to invent it and the reason we still haven’t quite understood what it is 500 years later is it is very hard to be scientific. Not because science is “expensive” but because it requires a fundamental epistemic humility, and humility is the hardest thing to wring out of the bombastic animals we are.
A useful thought as well see tens of thousands of anti-science, anti-market marching morons in New York today.