“OK, so maybe those gun nuts weren’t as crazy as I thought they were.”
Out: Gun control.
In. Government control.
[Update a while later]
Joe Scarborough is having second thoughts, too: “Gee, maybe background checks aren’t such a red-hot idea after all.”
I hope that this is the week that the American people finally wake up, after having stared into the abyss.
The paradox of the proof. A very interesting story about math.
Obama tells students, hey, don’t sweat this tyranny stuff. Big Brother Barack loves you!
As others point out, this experiment in self government was born from a justified fear and rejection of tyranny. Yeah, what would George Washington, John Adams or James Madison know about tyranny? And then there’s this wingnut:
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and those will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
Man, that black guy, Fred Douglas, must be one of those crazy militia types.
Jonah has more thoughts:
I like America’s instinctual fear of tyranny. It is single best bulwark against, you know, tyranny. It’s a bipartisan tendency by the way. Conservatives tend to fret most over government exceeding its Constitutional authority to encroach on civil society. The left tends to fret over excesses in the government’s constitutional obligation to protect our citizens from crime and foreign threats. Libertarians have an abundance of both concerns. Not surprisingly, I tend to find the left’s excesses more annoying than the right’s (“Oh no, the state is trying too hard to fight our enemies!”) but both instincts are healthy and shared to one extent or another by all Americans. It is the fundamental dogma of Americanness and I for one would hate to see it erode further.
It’s just another facet of the president’s lack of understanding of the founding principles, and his deep aversion to limited government and Constitutional principles.
It spent its fury on the southeastern part of the state, which got 15 inches of snow. All of which will melt and soak the soil and well, well, what do you know: the drought lifts. The dryness of the last few years is forgotten as the mean reasserts itself over the long run of the decade, which itself will be a wink, a blip, an inhalation to the next decades exhalation, just as the universe itself is a bang at the start and a great collapse at the end, like two flaps of a heart valve. Assuming there’s enough matter to cause the universe to contract, that is. I hope so. I hate the idea that it begins with a great gust of matter, spreads and cools and ends in silence. Because that would make the universe, in essence, a sneeze.
Geshundheit.
Time to celebrate Victims of Communism Day.
There are hundreds of millions of them.
This is the essay I’ve been meaning to write, but not taken the time. Fortunately, someone else did:
Consensus, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. The more easily testable and verifiable a theory, the less debate we would expect. There is little disagreement, for example, about the sum of one plus one or the average distance of the earth from the sun. But as a question becomes more complex and less testable, we would expect an increasing level of disagreement and a lessening of the consensus—think: the existence of god, the best band since the Beatles, or the grand unified theory of physics. On such topics, independent minds can—and should—differ.
We can use a simple formula to express how an idea’s popularity correlates with its verifiability. Let us introduce the K/C ratio—the ratio of “knowability,” a broad term loosely encapsulating how possible it is to reduce uncertainty about an idea’s correctness, to “consensus,” a measure of the idea’s popularity and general acceptance. Topics that are easily knowable (K ~ 1) should have a high degree of consensus (C ~ 1), whereas those that are impossible to verify (K ~ 0) should have a low degree of consensus (C ~ 0). When the ratio deviates too far from the perfect ratio of 1, either from too much consensus or too little, there is a mispricing of knowledge. Indeed, in cases of extreme deviations from the perfect ratio, additional support for a concept with such a lopsided K/C ratio increasingly subtracts from its potential veracity. This occurs because ideas exist not simply at a single temporal point, but rather evolve over the sweep of time. At the upper reaches of consensus, there is less updating of views to account for new information—so much so that supporters of the status quo tend to suppress new facts and hypothesis. Government agencies deny funding to ‘sham’ scientists, tenure boards dissuade young researchers from pursuing ‘the wrong’ track, and the establishment quashes heretical ideas.
…To see how this works in practice, we turn to the evergreen topic of climate change. Notwithstanding the underlying ecological threat of climate change itself, the debate about how to confront human-caused global warming has spawned unprecedented financial, political, and social risks of its own. Entire industries face extinction as the world’s governments seek to impose trillions of dollars of taxes on carbon emissions. The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman approvingly writes that Australian politicians—not to mention public figures through the world—now risk “political suicide” if they deny climate change. But if carbon dioxide turns out not to be the boogey-man that climate scientists have made it out to be, tens of trillions will be wasted in unneeded remediation. Much of the world—billions of humans—will endure a severely diminished quality of life with nothing to show for it. The growth trajectory of the world in the twenty-first century may well depend more on the “truth” of climate change ex ante than ex post.
With climate change, as in many areas of scientific complexity, we can (and do) use models to understand the world. But models have their problems. This is particularly true when dealing with complex, non-linear systems with a multitude of recursive feedback loops, in which small variations produce massive shifts in the long-term outcome. Pioneered by the mathematicians Edward Lorenz and Benoit Mandelbrot, chaos theory helped explain the intractability of certain problems. Readers of pop science will be familiar with the term the “butterfly effect,” in which “the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set[s] off a tornado in Texas.” The earth’s climate is one such dynamic, chaotic system and it is within the whirling, turbulent vortex of unpredictability that the modern climate scientists must tread.
And boldly have they stepped into the breach. The scope of agreement achieved by the world’s climate scientists is breathtaking. To first approximation, around 97% agree that human activity, particularly carbon dioxide emissions, causes global warming. So impressed was the Norwegian Nobel Committee by the work of the Inter-governmental Committee on Climate Change and Al Gore “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change” that it awarded them the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. So many great minds cannot possibly be wrong, right?
Wrong.
Trying to make it more humane and still affordable.
Of course, some people don’t think if a worthy goal. Iowahawk, who grew up on a hog farm (to the degree that he grew up at all), says that he doesn’t eat bacon because he likes it, but just for spite.
Are we on the verge of conquering it?
The comments are sort of interesting. A lot of the naturalistic fallacy is showing up there. I found particularly amusing the one commenter who couldn’t imagine that evolution could make a mistake.
[Via Geek Press]
Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt:
You see, the human desire to mimic and fit in is one of our strongest instincts. We are social apes. And we take our cues from stories, whether those stories unroll before our eyes, are in a sacred book, are passed down in the culture, or are poured at us in books and TV.
Now, here’s the thing – the Marxists understand this all too well. A few of you, before, when I called them a religion (there is no such thing as a secular religion, btw. Believing in afterlife is not needed for a religion. If I’m informed correctly some older forms of Judaism are at least mum on the subject. Communism is a mystery religion, relying on “something happens” to make their paradise come about right here on Earth. To their credit they work towards the ‘something” that is to transform man. To their lack of credit, both their goal and their methods are repugnant.) But they are. They have created their fantastical past paradise – the supposedly communitarian past/female dominant option not included, though they let the feminists run with it – their fall from grace – the introduction of private property – their sin – “greed”, meaning wish for personal improvement in circumstances – and their hope of paradise – the emergence of the homo Sovieticus, though I suppose they don’t call it that now. After that, of course, it would be the return to the communitarian paradise.
(They fail to understand that their communitarian paradise is actually a h*ll of individuals being treated as things, and that, because the collective can’t ever decide things as a collective, an individual ends up taking control. Which takes us right back to feudalism. But let that pass. And having told a commenter not to trust enemies of a religion as information on it, I’m bound to say I’m not. I was taught by true believers. It just didn’t take.)
I’ve always found normality to be highly overrated, myself. It’s not normal, for instance, to be much smarter than average, by definition. I’m always amused when people complain about gays wanting to “normalize” their behavior (which is clearly abnormal), as though there is a moral component to statistics.
Ross Douthat wonders what happened to it:
Go back and read the science fiction of the 1940s and ’50s, and you’ll be struck by the vaulting confidence that this expansion would continue upward and outward, and that a new age of exploration was just waiting to be born.
Today that confidence has vanished. Our Mars rovers are impressive and our billionaires keep pouring money into private spaceflight, but neither project captures the public’s imagination, and the very term “Space Age” seems antique. The Kepler 62 discovery might have earned more headlines at a less horrific moment, but it would have fallen out of the news soon enough.
It’s possible that we’re less interested in space travel because we feel that it’s a luxury good at a time when we have bigger problems here on Earth. But it’s also possible that we’ve gradually turned inward, to our smartphone screens and Facebook profiles, because we know that spaceflight isn’t going to get us to another world anytime soon.
Actually, if the latter is the case, “we” are too pessimistic, because we’re paying too much attention to NASA’s dysfunction, and not enough to what’s happening in the real world of spaceflight. I do think that the billionaires are capturing peoples’ attention, and as real things start to happen, they’ll do so much more.