Category Archives: Philosophy

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Ethics Of Mars One

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Many issues remain:

Since the 1960s – and following the Nuremberg trials – it has been standard practice for researchers to follow certain ethical standards in the treatment of human subjects. These rules include the requirement to submit research proposals to an ethics committee for prior approval, clearly explain clearly the risks of any procedures to potential research subjects, before obtaining their informed consent. Since Mars One now admits to planning research on the colonists themselves, the mission becomes bound to these same standards.

Mars One may not meet these conditions. As far as we know, no ethics committee has considered the Mars One plan or the risks it poses to the colonists. These risks will need to be communicated clearly before volunteers are recruited to take part in the mission.

I’ve previously expressed my own concerns, but I don’t agree that having it done by government space agencies instead is the solution, or that a disaster will inhibit human migration into space.

Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Fallacies Of Risk

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Some thoughts on their application to climate policy, in response to Judith Curry’s take.

As I noted on Twitter, two points. First, there really is no good physical case to be made that warmer global temperatures results in more extreme weather events. Storms are heat engines, driven by temperature differences, not total enthalpy. Also, I wrote about the fallacy of the precautionary principle as applied to climate policy four years ago.

History, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Shards

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A new essay from Bill Whittle:

Anduril reminds me that there is no Greatest Generation. There is no sword broken; there is no Golden Age lost and locked in the past. There are only shards lying before us, waiting for us to gather the will to reforge and wield them. It’s a decision, not a doom or a destiny, and we have to make it every day.

I don’t know if we can stop the destruction of everything we love in this world. I don’t know that we can destroy this all-seeing eye that seems to watch us all now, day and night, in this once-free land. I don’t know if all of my efforts will amount to anything at all, in the end, and I don’t know if yours will either.

I only know that every day I will make a decision to do everything I can to make sure my land, my realm, my America does not fall into darkness today.

Read all.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Morality

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We are apparently born with it.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. There are sound evolutionary reasons for us to cooperate. But these are statistical studies, and some people are clearly miswired and sociopathic. Many of them become politicians.

[Update a few minutes later]

This seems related somehow: Ace on the psychopathy of the Left:

Leftist politics, I maintain, are not a politics at all, but a psychological response to one’s shortcomings and feelings of failure. Leftist politics are, simply put, a way of getting even with a world that’s done one wrong — and most people carrying about such grievances against a world that’s done one wrong are psychologically broken.

These fairytale “politics” give them an avenue to vent their rages and turmoils about their failures and inadequacies in a way that is deemed, incorrectly, to be socially acceptable and even high-minded.

If a man were raving on the street in this fashion — about his hopes that someone would literally sh*t in a perceived “enemy’s” mouth (a perceived “enemy,” who, crucially, he’s never actually met) — most of us would shake our heads in secondary shame. Some of the more empathetic of us would call social services and attempt to have the madman brought in for psychological treatment.

But the left — Martin Bashir, Chris Matthews, Daily Kos, all of the hateful, raging, vibrating-with-resentment left — does this sort of thing in the guise of “political commentary” and no one makes the connection between this broken-souled primal screaming and mental unwellness.

All while their ratings remain in the same gutter as their political views.