While we’re discussing education, the theme of the current series of posts here on The Archdruid Report, it’s necessary to point out that there are downsides as well as upsides to take into account. The savant so saturated in abstractions that he’s hopelessly inept at the business of everyday life has been a figure of fun in literature for many centuries now, not least because examples of the type are so easy to find in every age.
That said, certain kinds of education have more tightly focused downsides. It so happens, for example, that engineers have contributed rather more to crackpot literature than most other professions. Hollow-earth theories, ancient-astronaut speculations, treatises arguing that the lost continent of Atlantis is located nearly anywhere on Earth except where Plato said it was—well, I could go on; engineers have written a really impressive share of the gaudier works in such fields. In my misspent youth, I used to collect such books as a source of imaginative entertainment, and when the jacket claimed the author was some kind of engineer, I knew I was in for a treat.
I treated that as an interesting coincidence until I spent a couple of years working for a microfilming company in Seattle that was owned by a retired Boeing engineer. He was also a devout fundamentalist Christian and a young-Earth creationist; he’d written quite a bit of creationist literature, though I never heard that any of it was published except as densely typed photocopied handouts—and all of it displayed a very specific logic: given that the Earth was created by God on October 23, 4004 BCE, at 9:00 in the morning, how can we explain the things we find on Earth today?
That is to say, he approached it as an engineering problem.
Engineers are trained to figure out what works. Give them a problem, and they’ll beaver away until they find a solution—that’s their job, and the engineering profession has been around long enough, and had enough opportunities to refine its methods of education, that a training in engineering does a fine job of teaching you how to work from a problem to a solution. What it doesn’t teach you is how to question the problem. That’s why, to turn to another example, you get entire books that start from the assumption that the book of Ezekiel was about a UFO sighting and proceed to work out, in impressive detail, exactly what the UFO must have looked like, how it was powered, and so on. “But how do we know it was a UFO sighting in the first place?” is the one question that never really gets addressed.
It’s occurred to me recently that another specific blindness seems to be hardwired into another mode of education, one that’s both prestigious and popular these days: a scientific education—that is to say, a technical education in the theory and practice of one of the hard sciences. The downside to such an education, I’d like to suggest, is that it makes you stupid about politics. Plenty of examples come to mind, and I’ll be addressing some of the others shortly, but the one I want to start with is classic in its simplicity, not to mention its simple-mindedness. This is the recent proposal by astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, which I quote in full:
Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) June 29, 2016
That might be dismissed as just another example of the thought-curtailing properties of Twitter’s 140-character limit—if a potter makes pots, what does Twitter make?—except that Tyson didn’t say, “here’s the principle behind the constitution, details to follow.” That’s his proposed constitution in its entirety.
More precisely, that’s his sound bite masquerading as a constitution. An actual constitution, as anyone knows who has actually read one, doesn’t just engage in a bit of abstract handwaving about how decisions are to be made. It sets out in detail who makes the decisions, how the decision-makers are selected, what checks and balances are meant to keep the decision-makers from abusing their positions, and so on. If Donald Trump, say, gave a speech saying, “We need a new scientific method that consists solely of finding the right answer,” he’d be mocked for not knowing the first thing about science. A similar response is appropriate here.
That said, Tyson’s proposal embodies another dimension of cluelessness about politics. Insisting that political decisions ought to be made exclusively on the basis of evidence sounds great, until you try to apply it to actual politics. Take that latter step, and what you’ll discover is that evidence is only tangentially relevant to most political decisions.
Consider the recent British referendum over whether to leave the European Union. That decision could not have been made on the basis of evidence, because all sides, as far as I know, agreed on the facts. Those were that Britain had joined the European Economic Community (as it then was) in 1973, that its membership involved ceding certain elements of national sovereignty to EU bureaucracies, and that EU policies benefited certain people in Britain while disadvantaging others. None of those points were at issue. The points that were at issue were values on the one hand, and interests on the other.
By values I mean judgments, by individuals and communities, about what matters and what doesn’t, what’s desirable and what isn’t, what can be tolerated and what can’t. These can’t be reduced to mere questions of evidence. A statement such as “the free movement of people across national borders is good and important” can’t be proved or disproved by any number of double-blind controlled studies. It’s a value that some people hold and others don’t, as is the statement “the right of people to self-determination must be protected from the encroachments of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.” Those values are in conflict with each other, and it was in large part over such values that the Brexit election was fought out and decided.
By interests I mean the relative distribution of costs and benefits. Any political decision, about any but the most trivial subject, brings benefits and has costs, and far more often than not the people who get the benefits and the people who carry the costs are not the same. EU membership for Britain was a case in point. By and large, the affluent got the majority of the benefits—they were the ones who could send their children to German universities and count on border-free travel to holidays in Spain—and the working poor carried the majority of the costs—they were the ones who had to compete for jobs against a rising tide of immigrants, while the number of available jobs declined due to EU policies that encouraged offshoring of industry to lower-wage countries.
What made the Brexit referendum fascinating, at least to me, was the way that so many of the pro-EU affluent tried to insist that the choice was purely about values, and that any talk about the interests of the working poor was driven purely by racism and xenophobia—that is to say, values. As I’ve noted here in numerous posts, the affluent classes in the industrial world have spent the last four decades or so throwing the working poor under the bus and then rolling the wheels back and forth over them, while insisting at the top of their lungs that they’re doing nothing of the kind.
Wage earners, and the millions who would be happy to earn a wage if they could find work, know better.
Here in America, for example, most people outside the echo chambers of the affluent remember perfectly well that forty years ago, a family with one working class income could afford a house, a car, and the other amenities of life, while today, a family with one working class income is probably living on the street. Shouting down open discussion of interests by insisting that all political decisions have to do solely with values has been a common strategy on the part of the affluent; the outcome of the Brexit referendum is one of several signs that this strategy is near the end of its shelf life.
In the real world—the world where politics has to function—interests come first. Whether you or I are benefited or harmed, enriched or impoverished by some set of government policies is the bedrock of political reality. Evidence plays a role: yes, this policy will benefit these people; no, these other people won’t share in those benefits—those are questions of fact, but settling them doesn’t settle the broader question. Values also play a role, but there are always competing values affecting any political decision worth the name; the pursuit of liberty conflicts with the pursuit of equality, justice and mercy pull in different directions, and so on.
To make a political decision, you sort through the evidence to find the facts that are most relevant to the issue—and “relevant,” please note, is a value judgement, not a simple matter of fact. Using the relevant evidence as a framework, you weigh competing values against one another—this also involves a value judgment—and then you weigh competing interests against one another, and look for a compromise on which most of the contending parties can more or less agree. If no such compromise can be found, in a democratic society, you put it to a vote and do what the majority says. That’s how politics is done; we might even call it the political method.
That’s not how science is done, though. The scientific method is a way of finding out which statements about nature are false and discarding them, under the not unreasonable assumption that you’ll be left with a set of statements about nature that are as close as possible to the truth. That process rules out compromise. If you’re Lavoisier and you’re trying to figure out how combustion works, you don’t say, hey, here’s the oxygenation theory and there’s the phlogiston theory, let’s agree that half of combustion happens one way and the other half the other; you work out an experiment that will disprove one of them, and accept its verdict. What’s inadmissible in science, though, is the heart of competent politics.
In science, furthermore, interests are entirely irrelevant in theory. (In practice—well, we’ll get to that in a bit.) Decisions about values are transferred from the individual scientist to the scientific community via such practices as peer review, which make and enforce value judgments about what counts as good, relevant, and important research in each field. The point of these habits is to give scientists as much room as possible to focus purely on the evidence, so that facts can be known as facts, without interference from values or interests. It’s precisely the habits of mind that exclude values and interests from questions of fact in scientific research that make modern science one of the great intellectual achievements of human history, on a par with the invention of logic by the ancient Greeks.
One of the great intellectual crises of the ancient world, in turn, was the discovery that logic was not the solution to every human problem. A similar crisis hangs over the modern world, as claims that science can solve all human problems prove increasingly hard to defend, and the shrill insistence by figures such as Tyson that it just ain’t so should be read as evidence for the imminence of real trouble. Tyson himself has demonstrated clearly enough that a first-rate grasp of astronomy does not prevent the kind of elementary mistake that gets you an F in Political Science 101. He’s hardly alone in displaying the limits of a scientific education; Richard Dawkins is a thoroughly brilliant biologist, but whenever he opens his mouth about religion, he makes the kind of crass generalizations and jawdropping non sequiturs that college sophomores used to find embarrassingly crude.
None of this is helped by the habit, increasingly common in the scientific community, of demanding that questions having to do with values and interests should be decided, not on the evidence, but purely on the social prestige of science. I’m thinking here of the furious open letter signed by a bunch of Nobel laureates, assailing Greenpeace for opposing the testing and sale of genetically engineered rice. It’s a complicated issue, as we’ll see in a moment, but you won’t find that reflected in the open letter. Its argument is simple: we’re scientists, you’re not, and therefore you should shut up and do as we say.
Let’s take this apart a step at a time. To begin with, the decision to allow or prohibit the testing and sale of genetically engineered rice is inherently political rather than scientific. Scientific research, as noted above, deals with facts as facts, without reference to values or interests. “If you do X, then Y will happen”—that’s a scientific statement, and if it’s backed by adequate research and replicable testing, it’s useful as a way of framing decisions. The decisions, though, will inevitably be made on the basis of values and interests. “Y is a good thing, therefore you should do X” is a value judgment; “Y will cost me and benefit you, therefore you’re going to have to give me something to get me to agree to X” is a statement of interest—and any political decision that claims to ignore values and interests is either incompetent or dishonest.
There are, as it happens, serious questions of value and interest surrounding the genetically engineered rice under discussion. It’s been modified so that it produces vitamin A, which other strains of rice don’t have, and thus will help prevent certain kinds of blindness—that’s one side of the conflict of values. On the other side, most seed rice in the Third World is saved from the previous year’s crop, not purchased from seed suppliers, and the marketing of the GMO rice thus represents yet another means for a big multinational corporation to pump money out of the pockets of some of the poorest people on earth to enrich stockholders in the industrial world. There are many other ways to get vitamin A to people in the Third World, but you won’t find those being discussed by Nobel laureates—nor, of course, are any of the open letter’s signatories leading a campaign to raise enough money to buy the patent for the GMO rice and donate it to the United Nations, let’s say, so poor Third World farmers can benefit from the rice without having to spend money they don’t have in order to pay for it.
These are the issues that have been raised by Greenpeace among others. To respond to that with a straightforward display of the logical fallacy called argumentum ad auctoritatem—“I’m an authority in the field, therefore whatever I say is true”—is bad reasoning, but far more significantly, it’s inept politics. You can only get away with that trick a certain number of times, unless what you say actually does turn out to be true, and institutional science these days has had way too many misses to be able to lean so hard on its prestige. I’ve noted in previous posts here the way that institutional science has blinded itself to the view from outside its walls, ignoring the growing impact of the vagaries of scientific opinion in fields such as human nutrition, the straightforward transformation of research into marketing in the medical and pharmaceutical industry, and the ever-widening chasm between the promises of safety and efficacy brandished by scientists and the increasingly unsafe and ineffective drugs, technologies, and policy decisions that burden the lives of ordinary people.
There are plenty of problems with that, but the most important of them is political. People make political decisions on the basis of their values and their perceived interests, within a frame provided by accepted facts. When the people whose job it is to present and interpret the facts start to behave in ways that bring their own impartiality into question, the “accepted facts” stop being accepted—and when scientists make a habit of insisting that the values and interests of most people don’t matter when those conflict, let’s say, with the interests of big multinational corporations that employ lots of scientists, it’s only a matter of time before whatever scientists say is dismissed out of hand as simply an attempt to advance their interests at the expense of others.
That, I’m convinced, is one of the major forces behind the widening failure of climate change activism, and environmental activism in general, to find any foothold among the general public. These days, when a scientist like Tyson gets up on a podium to make a statement, a very large percentage of the listeners don’t respond to his words by thinking, “Wow, I didn’t know that.” They respond by thinking, “I wonder who’s paying him to say that?” That would be bad enough if it was completely unjustified, but in many fields of science—especially, as noted earlier, medicine and pharmacology—it’s become a necessary caveat, as failures to replicate mount up, blatant manipulation of research data comes to light, and more and more products that were touted as safe and effective by the best scientific authorities turn out to be anything but.
Factor that spreading crisis of legitimacy into the history of climate change activism and it’s not hard to see the intersection. Fifteen years ago, the movement to stop anthropogenic climate change was a juggernaut; today it’s a dead letter, given lip service or ignored completely in national politics, and reduced to a theater of the abusrd by heavily publicized international agreements that commit no one to actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Much of the rhetoric of climate change activism fell into the same politically incompetent language already sketched out—“We’re scientists, you’re not, so shut up and do as you’re told”—and the mere fact that they were right, and that anthropogenic climate change is visibly spinning out of control around us right now, doesn’t change the fact that such language alienated far more people than it attracted, and thus helped guarantee the failure of the movement.
******************
In other news, I'm pleased to report that the print edition of The Archdruid Report is now open for subscribers. Stone Circle Press, appropriately enough, will be publishing the Report monthly as a zine. Their sales website, still very basic as yet, is here.
364 comments:
-Joel
7/13/16, 6:22 PM
whomever said...
I work in computers, and there's a huge tendency among the people I work with to, in the words of someone I can't remember, see the law and politics as a Universal Turning Machine. That is, they believe that people and the law work just like computer programs and that if they can come up with a clever reading of the law they've found a bug they can exploit, even though an actual lawyer would roll their eyes and explain patiently that no, common law doesn't work that way, intent etc. This mindset then leads into a lot of the more whacky stuff coming out from various libertarian types, who don't seem to realize that they are making exactly the same mistaken assumptions that the communists did in the 1930s, that we can just engineer away human nature. This will have exactly the same results in the very unlikely event any of their suggestions ever actually happen in practice.
By the way, if you ever want to make a Bay-Area resident change the subject, point out that the current Bay-Area economy looks exactly like Detroit's did circa 1955 or so.
Then you combine all this with what I've heard described as "Doctor Investment Syndrome". I used to work in finance, and If you ever talk to someone in finance, the general consensus is that doctors are, without question, the worlds worst investors: They (in the general, obviously there are exceptions) are really arrogant, smart but not quite as smart as they think they are, have a chunk of money to burn and assume that the knowledge they have about the human body carries over perfectly to working out how the markets work, in a sort of Dunning-Kreuger effect. This makes them perfect marks for buying Florida Swampland and the like, and the Bernie Madoffs of the world are great at exploiting this; the general consensus is if a Doctor invests in something, run far, far, far away.
Combine all this and you get some truly strange ideas coming out of a number of nominally smart people who are nevertheless talking about something they don't know at all. You see this all the time.
On the plus side, you'll be happy to know that the record Lake Mead water lows are being fixed by negotiation: http://azdailysun.com/news/national/facing-historically-low-levels-lake-mead-officials-are-fending-off/article_9965d9d0-87da-5189-a093-428e3d3fffdf.html
7/13/16, 6:23 PM
whomever said...
7/13/16, 6:25 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
And you now have at least one happy subscriber to the print version. I figure the benefits to being able to continue to read this will be worth the small cost. Plus, it supports your writing, which to my mind is a very good thing.
Finally, Cherokee, not sure if you saw it, but I replied to you on the previous post. Thank you for taking the time to reply to me, and I'm happy to keep our conversation going.
7/13/16, 6:30 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
7/13/16, 6:32 PM
Shane W said...
7/13/16, 6:38 PM
aaa said...
Also, there's a book on the phenomenon of people being smart about science but dumb about politics:
Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-battering System That Shapes Their Lives, Jeff Schmidt, 2001.
Parts of this book are about exactly the phenomenon you describe, and about how the training process makes it so. The writing is a bit brutal and driven by the authors personal experiences, which give it a dark edge :-(. In 1 sentence, it says that highly educated professionals, even when they are staunch defenders of scientific integrity and political independence within their field, are much more likely to be conformist (politically submissive) outside their field.
-pb
7/13/16, 6:44 PM
Ixtlan said...
7/13/16, 7:02 PM
Marcu said...
Among my engineering friends there is a strong belief that the world would be a great place if it was ruled by engineers. I seriously doubt that this would work. My main take away from this week's essay is that no single system can solve all of our problems.
#############################
The next meeting of the Green Wizard's Association of Melbourne will be held on the last Saturday of July. All interested parties are invited to attend. For those people who are unsure about the nature of our meetings, imagine a long descent support group with some intentional living discussion mixed in.
If you are interested to join us, meet us on Saturday the 30th of July 2016 at 13:00. The venue is, Vapiano, 347 Flinders Lane, Melbourne Victoria, Australia.
Send queries and comments to limitstogrowth1972[at]gmail.com.
Just look for the green wizard's hat.
P.S. I have created a webpage where I will post the details of the next meeting and any further details for those who don't frequent the comments here. The webpage can be found at wormlamp.com/gwam
7/13/16, 7:05 PM
Justin said...
Nobody, not climate skeptics, nor climate scientists, nor Al Gore, properly understands the effects that water vapor and clouds has on the planet. In fact, I think IPCC 5 (I went on a climate paper binge about a year ago, after taking a certain prediction about 2030 seriously for about a week, I haven`t paid any attention since) even admits that there is essentially no way to properly model the water vapor-cloud system`s effects on the climate even in a vague-but accurate long term sort of way. On top of that, human activities such as agriculture, putting aerosols into the atmosphere, air travel, etc have serious effects on this system that are not properly modeled. I don`t mean to say that everything will be fine, I`m saying that based on my reading of the facts, nobody really has a clue what`s going to happen including myself, except that it probably will not be a good thing. Of course, maybe I think this way because I`m an engineer.
It's also worth considering that based on the actual actions and statements of the 'climate community', conspiracy theories about global governance aren't really as illogical as your average climate scientist will claim they are.
One strange (bright?) spot here in Canada is that the Conservative party has adopted "because it's the current year" as a quasi-slogan. I read this as a direct mockery of the popular liberal notion that because it's, well, the current year, X should be Y. Of course, my perspective on the issue is fairly slanted due to sharing the author's views about progress.
7/13/16, 7:09 PM
A Post-Millennial said...
7/13/16, 7:14 PM
Chris Smith said...
Back when I was an underpaid philosophy lecturer, I tried to drive this point home to my students. I forced my poor freshmen students to read Alan Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Not just the "nine objections," but the whole damn paper. I had an agenda for this. After reading the paper, I asked my class what the most important point in the paper was. Way too many pointed to some of the tables or explanations of how discrete state devices work. Others would point to the idea of the Turing test. After allowing my class to discuss for a few minutes, I directed their attention to this paragraph:
It was suggested tentatively that the question, "Can machines think?" should be replaced by "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?" If we wish we can make this superficially more general and ask "Are there discrete-state machines which would do well?" But in view of the universality property we see that either of these questions is equivalent to this, "Let us fix our attention on one particular digital computer C. Is it true that by modifying this computer to have an adequate storage, suitably increasing its speed of action, and providing it with an appropriate programme, C can be made to play satisfactorily the part of A in the imitation game, the part of B being taken by a man?"
That is, Turing is equating intelligence with intelligible behavior (i.e. some form of behaviorism or functionalism). If you disagree with Turing's premise about what constitutes intelligence, then the rest of the paper will fail to convince you. In short, pay attention to what is actually under consideration. (The same thing holds for John Searle's Chinese Room rejoinder to Turing in "Brains, Minds, and Programs" - which always struck me as an elaborate exercise in circular thinking. Gee, John, if we assume that you are right about the nature of consciousness, then you are right about the nature of consciousness.)
I like to think I got some of my students interested in probing some underlying assumptions. At least a few of them even dared to question their lecturer on occasion.
7/13/16, 7:32 PM
siliconguy said...
7/13/16, 7:33 PM
Nestorian said...
One of the books on the topic that I own is by an engineer named Walt Brown. JMG, is that the person you worked for?
The other remark about this matter that I will hazard relates to the point about the diminishing credibility of scientific authority. For me personally, this lack of intellectual credibility on the part of the scientific establishment was powerfully reinforced by my several years of intense research into the intellectual viability of young earth creationism, beginning around 2007.
Among other things, I found that most scientific proponents of the opposite persuasion are unable to distinguish logical circularities from sound reasoning. They also engage constantly in fallacious ad hominem attacks against their opponents, as well as the precise type of flawed reasoning from authority that JMG deplores in this week's post. There is also quite a bit of handwaving masquerading as rigorous logic in their attempts to defend against young-earth creationist attacks.
To sum up: Based on my appraisal of the controversy, young earth creationist tend to be far better logicians than their scientific opponents.
I know many readers of this blog are puzzled by the continuing persistence of young-earth creationist views in today's world. Please consider my current post to be a small contribution towards explaining this state of affairs.
7/13/16, 7:42 PM
Yeast in a Bottle said...
Paul Beckwith, the paleo-climate scientist from Canada (https://paulbeckwith.net/) seems like the poster child for your essay's points on the failure of climate change activism. He is genuinely flummoxed at why he makes climate change sense yet the powers that be and the general public don't react to his dire predictions. He has brilliantly connected many dots but has no grasp at all on Realpolitik.
7/13/16, 7:42 PM
Glenn said...
Glenn
in the Bramblepatch
Marrowstone Island
Salish Sea
Cascadia
7/13/16, 7:44 PM
The Cloudwalking Owl said...
Personally, I'm of the opinion that science is pretty much a process of developing consensus rather than TRUTH. That's what the whole process of moving from hypothesis to theory by using things like falsifiability and peer reviewed journals is all about. In the same way, my experience of politics is also about developing a consensus through a series of labourious mechanisms to allow a "meeting of minds". I'd suggest that that's what the whole campaign of Bernie Sanders was all about---trying to bring new ideas into a Democratic party that was pretty much moribund.
Anyway, Mr. Greer is an expert at crafting narratives that explain the world. I don't have exactly the same narrative, but there is overlap. So I will leave it at that.
7/13/16, 7:50 PM
Jim said...
First, I'm an engineer, and really proud of my training and how it has molded my thought processes. Yet I have to agree that I, too, have seen a scary number of goofy non-technical proposals put forth by engineers.
However I don't think that the fault lies specifically in the training that engineers receive but it is more related to the confidence engineers accumulate by actually making things happen and the ease with which engineers can assemble relationships with ideas combined with the lack of training, and interest, engineers have in social and value concepts. This issue is made worse by, what to me, is one of the most incredible characteristics of the human mind. That is the ability to compartmentalize different subjects and put impenerable barriers between them. For example, a person can be quite talented at, say, solving complex math problems related to physical subjects and not be able to balance their checkbook. I attribute this dichotomy to interest, or values. I had an engineering mentor many years ago that was a wonderful engineer and a young earth creationist. It boggled my mind that he could be so clever and resourceful on technical subjects and simply accept his parent's religion without thought.
About politics and compromise. I'm suprised that in your discussion about interests and compromise you left out what to me is the core of our political problems today, power. If you have the financial power to tempt, cajole and threaten the people who find politics a way of life your interests simply dominate the playing field. The compromises that ensue have nothing to do with any kind of balance between the parties. The compromises end up being essentially chaff thrown to the parties with the least power.
We agree that there is a great deal of distrust of experts. This distrust is spread over all levels of "authority". Scientists aren't trusted. Politicians (especially) aren't trusted. Business people aren't trusted. I attribute this problem much more to the abuse of power much more than to confusion between facts and values.
Regarding climate change I feel that the scientists have done a good job of identifying a problem and making the problem public. However solving the problem shows promise of breaking the rice bowl of very, very powerful organizations and people and those people and organizations have thrown fortunes literally at obscuring the scientific data and personally discrediting the individuals who have done the work.
I agree completely with you about the reaction of people to globalization, but isn't this too an issue of power? The policies have been put forth in collaboration with those having the power to move politicians and the media into making globalization fait accompli. But there is a value issue here too. Millions of Americans have suffered from the effects of globalization. Tens of millions of Asians have benefitted. I honestly can't say it is evil but my guess is that the life expectations of the Americans have suffered more than the aspirations of Asians have been met.
Thanks again for the steady diet of thoughtful discourse (even tho' I don't always agree!)
7/13/16, 7:54 PM
Bryan L. Allen said...
In reality, I think Pokemon Go already usurped the mind space for Rationalia. If Rationalia had ever made it to market, it would have probably looked the same: people holding their smartphones out in front of them, poking at the glowing screen while twitching about and muttering.
7/13/16, 8:22 PM
Jim Irwin said...
thought provoking, I hope you keep this up, expect that you will get much input from specialists in all of the disciplines and inspire more of the same...
7/13/16, 8:30 PM
jessi thompson said...
I look forward to part 2 of the article: "Politicized Education as a Cause of Scientific Stupidity." ;)
7/13/16, 8:32 PM
Dennis Mitchell said...
Betrayal is a vicious emotion.
The matter of climate change reminds me of the tobacco industry. All the lies presented by "scientists". The government subsidies and hypocrisy. The killing of innocent bystanders. I'm remembering that line from Dragnet. "...just the facts mam."
7/13/16, 8:45 PM
Justin said...
Back when I worked as an engineer (not that long ago), there was very little that I liked about sitting in an air-conditioned office drawing things on a computer and periodically going down into the shop, with all it's trappings and discomforts, to sort something out with a welder. Although I do believe that I was gifted with the particular kind of mind well-suited to the sort of informal optimization process involved in designing custom machinery, I've learned not to consider it to be a source of generalized virtue. It wasn't that the division of labor was inappropriate, but I was never really comfortable with the upstairs/downstairs divide. I liked going on installations, where I would plunk my laptop down on whatever surface was appropriate and maintain an active dialogue with the workers I was responsible for directing.
Ironically, partially due to the financialization of the Canadian economy, I now work almost entirely with computers in a stupidly abstract sort of way. I like it a little bit better - I miss the interactions with real things that I can touch and working class types, but I don't miss the uncomfortable classist undertones of the typical custom fabrication shop. The thing I disliked the most was the need to stay dressed up, which was obnoxious because touching a piece of machinery or shaking a worker's hand when needed became an exercise in remembering not to touch your clothes afterwards without appearing bothered by the grease or whatever on your hand. On the other hand, I might have to develop some sort of smartwatch that dispenses blood pressure medications and sedatives if it detects John Oliver, Degrasse Tyson or their ilk on the Apple TV in the work lunchroom again.
7/13/16, 8:54 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
And in reply to some of your comments to the previous post, why are so many of you kids so eager for violent insurrection? Do you honestly not understand how destructive that is to the general population, especially the lower economic levels? Have you not looked at what happens in the world when insurgents start shooting? Have you not noticed who it is that suffers the most? Hint: it is NOT the upper classes.
Wars are conceived of, started by, and beneficial to the upper classes. They are fought by and murderous of the lower classes.
7/13/16, 9:06 PM
richard b said...
in the meantime it seems that everyone on earth is benefiting from fossil fuels - often in the form of just being alive - since modern populations are unsustainable without them.
so the cost of stopping fossil fuels in time to save the planet increasingly look like the poor will be asked to pay with their lives - unless one believes in some utopian energy transition that allows for a free lunch.
sadly the free lunch is the only politically acceptable solution - so we seem doomed to fail our planet and ourselves.
meanwhile, people like the Republicans in congress seem so beholden to big oil that they are quite content to sell the entire planet along with all its wonderful plants and animals down the river in exchange for a few short years of living in luxury.
alternatively, they are just badly misinformed or incredibly stupid.
so will we ever avert this danger in time seeing as there are cogent arguments that we are already too late?
I fear not, and that's left is to watch the unfolding disaster, and mourn mankind's short sightedness - and maybe say I told you so - while we fly around and drive our SUV's just like the next guy.
7/13/16, 9:08 PM
Repent said...
I personally struggle with trade-offs in my daily life. More work equals more money, but less spare time. More time spent doing the things I want and love to do, means less time to focus on advancing my career. The whole 'Robbing Peter to pay Paul' financial dilemma, where no matter what you choose, automatically prevents you from doing, having, or experiencing something else. Trade-offs make life hard.
Tyson is also a problematic person as you indicated. He recently went toe to toe with a 'Moon hoax' advocate, and although he logically won every argument, I was left at the end of the podcast feeling cheated and thinking the very same thing that you have suggested here as "Who is paying him to say this?"
https://youtu.be/H8BlN72r_Xk?t=5s
Science needs to find a way to be inclusive to the general public, rather than exclusive as it currently is now. Also, on the subject of Atlantis, I recently forwarded a youtube video to my brother who is an accredited Archeologist, about evidence that there was a pre-Egyptian society that had 15th century technology, including advanced seafaring ships, and that they had made accurate maps of the Atlantic portion of Antarctica, millennia before modern world discoveries of the 1800's. After forwarding this video to my brother, the video was promptly taken down by youtube within a day or two. Hard not to see that there is an agenda to take down anything that doesn't agree with the status quo.
Here is something similar: https://youtu.be/GxyPKM-tXTw?t=4s
7/13/16, 9:16 PM
John D. Wheeler said...
7/13/16, 9:25 PM
John Roth said...
Nah, what you're going to see is people wearing virtual/augmented reality headsets. There are already projects to build virtual meeting rooms, play spaces and similar that aren't games and that avoid the problems of being controlled by massive corporations.
7/13/16, 9:36 PM
Timothy John Sharp said...
7/13/16, 9:47 PM
Doubt Truth to be a Liar said...
'The idea that a few people have about the gene being the target of selection is completely impractical; a gene is never visible to natural selection, and in the genotype, it is always in the context with other genes, and the interaction with those other genes make a particular gene either more favorable or less favorable ... Therefore people like Dawkins in England who still think the gene is the target of selection are evidently wrong ... Yet the funny thing is if in England, you ask a man in the street who the greatest living Darwinian is, he will say Richard Dawkins. And indeed, Dawkins has done a marvelous job of popularizing Darwinism. But Dawkins' basic theory of the gene being the object of evolution is totally non-Darwinian. I would not call him the greatest Darwinian.'
https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/mayr/mayr_print.html
Mayr was being very polite. To paraphrase Gould, Dawkins is at best a caricature of a Darwinian.
7/13/16, 9:48 PM
Unknown said...
Dear JMG,
I have read 20-30 posts of the ADR over the last 4 months, and I don't know whether to curse you or to thank you dearly.
On one hand, I discovered that many of the assumptions I have been taught or taken for granted are incorrect (even if I still unconsciously believe and apply them). More importantly, I can sometimes detect when I'm making a decision with one of these beliefs, and correct the decisision or thought. I also sometimes recognize when somebody says something based off these assumptions which is false.
I have always been a truth seeker, and now I finally found the explanation to many of today's and tomorrow's problems. Now I know how to prepare for the future and what to expect, along with ways of avoiding the worst of the collapse.
On the other hand, I have always lived the suburban affluent air-conditioned McMansion lifestyle. I never experienced any violence, conflict, change, or pain. Now I wish I was born 50 years earlier, and this thought haunts ne every day.
Also, I have taken an interest in computers and technology since I was a toddler. I have spent thousands of hours learning about programming, hardware, systems, and networking. I am also going to college in a month to study information systems. Knowing that most of this will be useless after the collapse makes me feel hopeless. My parents also work in high-tech jobs which would probably be gone immediately when the collapse starts.
You frequently mention that the upper classes of society have neglected the lower classes and environment, while insisting they weren't. Knowing that I am part of the upper class, and have believed the talking heads on CNN for years without thinking of the damage I have caused to my own future and upcoming generations, makes me feel guilty. Even more so, growing up around computers and knowing that automation has made hundreds of millions of people poorer, while benefiting people like me.
I know you've said many times that high technology and material wealth doesn't make people happy, beyond a certain point. I am sure I could adapt to a 1940's middle-class lifestyle, or higher, without being unhappy. But the prospect of change, especially with the violence and conflict involved, weighs down every day.
Therefore I don't know whether the burden of the truth is worse than all the pain I can avoid. Hopefully you can tell me that it isn't?
Unless this is just a useless, off-topic rant and I wasted your time. Sorry if I did that.
7/13/16, 9:48 PM
Genevieve Hawkins said...
Now somebody would need some solid evidence to make me think it's real. Like empty store shelves. Closed stores. Shotguns pointed at my face. The rest is just divide and conquer BS, and who is really listening anymore?
7/13/16, 9:50 PM
Wendy Crim said...
I was all ready to order a six month subscription to print version but it only has PayPal as payment. I don't do PayPal. Maybe this will change?
For my birthday last week, my husband pre ordered Dark Age America for me. I can't wait.
I'm currently reading more southern gothic fiction from the forties and fifties. I know that's not old enough for you assignment, but there are many phrases and themes to make young people today squirm. I just finished The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O'Conner. Now that's a heavy religious ride! As familiar as I am with the south and these type of novels, some of it had me asking internal questions. And I'm about half way through Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms. Definitive gender roles, race roles, class roles. Whoa. I don't know if many college students could handle it. But, as hard as some of these issues can be, the beauty and art of these kind of novels always keeps me coming back for more. You know, I've a copy of Stars Reach and Twilights Last Gleaming and I am often recommending them. Not one person I know has been able to get through either novel. What do you think that means?
One last thing....I honestly can't even remember what brought it up...but my husband and I were JUST talking about how engineers can inadvertently cause more problems than they solve. I mean, like hours before I read this. But I'm no engineer and only have the slightest bit of interaction with any so please, do not take offense any engineers on here.
Ok, last comment really. I think it is very brave of the young earth creationist to come out on this blog. I often find myself saying things in a group that I get ridiculed for, so I know it's not always easy to be honest and vulnerable. Same for Brexit supporters and Trump supporters. As they say, you can't be everybody's cup of tea.
7/13/16, 9:53 PM
Hammer said...
7/13/16, 9:54 PM
Weogo said...
Ron Evans is a Native American Keeper of Stories, raised in northern Saskatchewan.
He is also a storyteller.
'Keeper of Stories' means that he has learned his people's oral history, and can repeat verbatim stories that have been told exactly the same way for a very long time.
He will very clearly tell you that his people came to North America about 32,000 years ago.
His people say their oral history is as accurate a history as anything written.
How do you reconcile this history, and those of other traditional cultures around the world that have longer time frames, with yours?
JMG, in addition to your other points, gmo 'golden rice' tastes bad.
Some Rice growing areas that went big in to commercial, 'high yield' Rice varieties have had problems.
Many of these varieties only grow well under optimal conditions.
Extended drought or monsoon can almost completely destroy a crop.
Sri Lanka and other locations are bringing back old varieties that will produce a crop under adverse conditions.
Thanks and good health, Weogo
7/13/16, 10:09 PM
Roy Smith said...
In other news, the first gathering of the Cascadia Guild was held yesterday, and I have posted my first cut of a summary of some of the things we discussed. There will be more posts and ideas to follow, and you can read them all on The Cascadia Guild website.
7/13/16, 10:11 PM
Mark Rice said...
Hey -- I resemble that characterization. When I was young and single, I wondered why I had such a hard time getting laid. Now in hindsight the answer is obvious.
Somewhat similar ground was covered in the essay The Moral Economy of Tech.
a quote:
"As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you.
"The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable.
"But as anyone who's worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence."
7/13/16, 10:13 PM
patriciaormsby said...
Okay, let me finish reading! But I've got some praise for you stored up from last week.
7/13/16, 10:34 PM
team10tim said...
I have a personal maxim that may be useful for understanding this science/politics divide:
Everything in the world makes sense, always, the trick to understanding it is figuring out what perspective it makes sense from. (preposition at the end of the sentence is intentional, grammarians can [expletive deleted] off*)
Thanks,
Tim
* The grammar note makes a good segue. Languages are living things and they evolve (for lack of a better word) over time. Grammars are not living things, they are formed after the fact to codify a language based upon how it was used in the past.
7/13/16, 10:47 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Whomever, too funny. No question, California's on track to become the Rust Belt of the 21st century -- they're making all the same mistakes that were made in the old industrial heartland in the mid-20th century. As for Doctor Investment Syndrome, this makes perfect sense to me, based on the physicians I've known!
W.B., thank you. I'm not making any money off the print edition, any more than I make off this blog -- the subscription price pays for the cost of production and mailing, and that's pretty much it -- but I don't mind; as with the blog, it's publicity rather than profit, and I figure that people who like either one will buy my books and/or put something in the tip jar. As for questions about the print edition, see the comment by A Post-Millennial above.
Aaa, science fiction and fantasy authors tend to be on the skeptical end of things, oddly enough. I suspect the pressure from fans in both genres to make the details consistent and convincing makes us authors hypersensitive about logical lapses!
Ixtlan, I think it was someone familiar... ;-)
Marcu, you're welcome and thank you. I suspect a society run by engineers would proceed with the maximum efficiency and rationality toward profoundly irrational goals...
Justin, no question, the detailed forecasts on offer from IPCC et al. are dubious at best. That's why I base my predictions on paleoclimatology: "what happened the last time these conditions occurred?" tends to be a much more accurate source of predictions than abstract models of poorly understood whole systems.
Chris, I think you're missing the point of Searles' metaphor. What he's shown is that a given set of behavior -- the ability to respond to messages in Chinese -- can be an indicator of two wholly different sets of mental processes. Since each of us has experienced those processes directly in our own minds, and knows the difference between them, it's not necessary to presuppose the accuracy of his model -- just that, as each of us knows, there's a difference between rote repetition of behavior and actual understanding of a process. The Turing test, at least to me, seems to presuppose that there is no such difference.
Siliconguy, all I can say is that I've read a great many books by engineers who, for all intents and purposes, and in contexts where marketing and management weren't involved, demonstrated a complete inability to question the starting point of their investigations.
Nestorian, while (as you know) I don't agree with you about the age of the Earth, I'll certainly grant that most would-be debunkers of young Earth creationism (and everything else defined by the current pseudoskeptic scene as pseudoscience, for that matter) rely constantly on circular reasoning, ad hominem arguments, and logical howlers old enough to have names in Latin. If these guys are the defenders of science and reason, science and reason are in real trouble.
Yeast, he also hasn't realized that so many people have tried to use dire predictions to scare others into agreeing with them that, these days, that strategy basically doesn't work any more. David Cameron's attempts to bully British voters into voting for Remain by waving around threats are a case in point; these days, when you trot out the scare stories -- even if they're true! -- people just roll their eyes and walk away.
7/13/16, 10:48 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Owl, er, you may need to reread the post, as you've gotten confused about what I said. Who benefits from what technology isn't a matter of values, it's a matter of interests. While you're right that social science research could, in theory, determine the probable economic consequences of introducing GMO rice, I trust you don't think Monsanto's going to hand over a grant to any social scientist who might say "Actually, this is a really bad idea." That said, you're right about speaking outside one's field of expertise; that was my point, or part of my point, in suggesting a tweet by Donald Trump about the scientific method, as Tyson apparently knows about as much about politics as Trump does about science.
Jim, I think it's more than confidence based on experience, as I've met a lot of newly minted engineers who have the same attitude -- thus my speculation that it's the product of common trends in engineering education. As for the power of vested interests, it's been a constant refrain of climate change activists that that's what's kept them from accomplshing their goals -- but every reform in history was carried out in the teeth of resistance from those who benefit from the existing order of things. Other movements for reform have succeeded anyway. Climate change activism has flopped. The core difference, I'd argue, is that those other movements played their cards well, while climate change activists have by and large played them very, very poorly. More on this as we proceed!
Bryan, funny. These days, though, I think we should talk less about virtual reality and more about vicial reality. Vicial? Yep; it relates to "vicious" the way that "virtual" relates to "virtuous"...
Jim, thank you. It's been ongoing for ten years, and I plan on keeping things going for the foreseeable future.
Jessi, I'll certainly consider that. There are so many kinds of induced stupidity these days that it's kind of like shooting fish in a barrel...
Dennis, betrayal is indeed a vicious emotion. I wonder if the people responsible have any idea just how much rage is directed at them these days.
Richard, not at all. It's too late to prevent a real mess, but it's not too late to take concerted action to give our descendants a better world than they'll otherwise get -- and the insistence that we might as well just keep on driving our SUVs is, to my mind, just another copout.
Repent, thank you. If you have the chance, you might want to check out Charles Hapgood's book Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, which I believe is back in print -- Hapgood's the guy who originally noticed that there's data on some very old maps that can't be squared with current theories about the state of geographical knowledge in ancient, medieval, and early modern times. It's a thought-provoking book!
Timothy, I believe that the people who are issuing the print edition (I'm not one of them -- I just provide content) will be doing that; drop a note to A Post-Millennial, at the email address included in his comment above, if you want to know the details.
Doubt, I may have misread Dawkins, then. I took what he was saying to mean that, for reasons rooted ultimately in statistics, evolution in a population functions as though individual genes were competing with one another against selective pressures -- which in turn could be rephrased as the more modest claim that a model working along those lines is an effective predictor of actual evolution. Still, I may have gotten that from my college classes in ecology and mapped it onto Dawkins' writings.
7/13/16, 11:07 PM
Stuart Jeffery said...
Facts were not agreed on in the campaign. The Brexiteers continued to campaign using a 'fact' that the EU costs the UK £350m per week - blatantly untrue.
That said, the 'control' value and accompanying narratives were an excellent lesson in magical manipulation of the masses by the leading leave campaigners. The remainers had no such value to campaign with.
7/13/16, 11:12 PM
Gottfried Wilhelm Melvin Hicks-Leibniz said...
This betrayal to a good fraction of his support base will likely benefit Trump more so than what Clinton's campaign thought. At this point, a Clinton win seems more likely if Sanders becomes her VP choice, which would make his "change of heart" a bit understandable.
7/13/16, 11:18 PM
John Michael Greer said...
As far as your schooling and career, collapse is not a fast thing. The US has been in decline, by measurable objective standards, for several decades now; that decline is accelerating -- but even so, you're likely to be able to use computer skills for some time to come. You might consider, as time permits, learning how to do something that isn't dependent on computers -- the example I like to suggest to people is learning how to homebrew beer, since that means you can produce a commodity for which there will always be a market!
It's been pointed out many times that waking up to the reality of the hard future ahead is like experiencing the death of a family member. You're going through the grieving process right now, and that's difficult. On the other side is a world full of new possibilities -- and knowing that it's coming, and that the future promised by the myth of progress is never going to happen, will make it possible for you to help the people you care about navigate the rough waters of the years ahead. To my mind, that makes the knowledge worth the grief.
Genevieve, the medical industry is terrified of the placebo effect. It works better than most medicines, it's cheap, and physicians are lousy at using it these days because they've forgotten how to interact with their patients. No wonder you couldn't get funding!
Wendy, you might want to email A Post-Millennial, who put his email on an earlier comment, and ask him if there's some other way you can pay for the subscription. My guess is that Stone Circle Press will be happy to work things out. As for my two novels, hmm! Have you asked people why they haven't been able to get through them?
Hammer, that could be it.
Weogo, that is to say, it's standard agribusiness groupthink, producing a product that would work perfectly in a predictable world and works very poorly in ours.
Roy, thank you and congrats -- may the guild flourish!
Mark, that makes absolute sense to me. I've also noticed that people who play too many video games lose the ability to solve problems in the real world, because video games create an imaginary environment in which every problem was invented by a human being and therefore has an answer that makes immediate sense to the human mind.
Patricia, and that's a crucial point, of course.
Tim, fair enough!
7/13/16, 11:25 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Gottfried, my first thought when I heard about Sanders selling out was that he'd been promised the VP slot. Clinton's people may have finally gotten around to realizing just how vulnerable she is, not to mention how widely hated, and that would be a logical attempt at damage control. We'll see what comes of it.
7/13/16, 11:40 PM
Zachary Braverman said...
Too bad more scientists don't take him to heart. :)
7/13/16, 11:40 PM
Godfree Roberts said...
Only 20% of Chinese think climate change is a major concern, yet the government has passed lots of legislation and is spending billions – far more, per capita than any comparable developing nation – to mitigate its effects. Funny thing is, 80% of Chinese approve of their governments climate change policy. They themselves don't see a problem but apparently trust the government's judgement.
There's something to be said for Singapore-style governance when confronting long-term threats like climate change, educational underachievement and inequity. Our faith in amateur, unqualified temp workers to make equitable policies is is justified: someone who is only temporarily in office and who will bear no responsibility for bad outcomes. What do they care?
7/13/16, 11:45 PM
deedl said...
I work in a government institution that provides other government institutions with software either by making it by ourselves or by acquiring it from software companies. Those two ways of acquiring differ totally in their approach, because the letter one involves contracts and money. When evaluating software, it has to be verified and validated, which are two different things. Verification is testing whether the product behaves as required (solving a problem), while validation is checking if the software required by the customer improves the situation of the customer (questioning the problem). So in engineering there is a scientific concept of questioning a given task, called validation. However, when a piece of software is developed by a contractor, the contractor does not care about validation, because he is paid to deliver what is required by the contract. So he will verify to prove that he has fulfilled the contract, but he does not spend resources to care whether the product improves the situation of the customer. When we develop the software by ourselves as an intergovernmental service, we don’t have to care about money and contracts so we can spend much time together with the customer validating our doings to improve his situation. So I think the problem of engineers not questioning the task lies at least partially in most of them being embedded in a market economy with all its restrictions.
I think engineering stands out from other scientific fields in the way that the work that is done by engineers is constantly tested under the most complex test condition - in reality. Thus engineers know that their scientific tool box is right, because planes fly, computers compute and televisions show moving pictures. Thus all engineering is based on tons of empirical evidence. Most scientific fields do not have a permanent testing field for theories with trillions of test cases done by billions of users every day, so many other fields are full of untested theories and opinions. Not being aware of this, many engineers assume that other scientific tool boxes are as true and as based on empirical evidence as their own one. This I think makes them at first submissive to other scientific fields. However, being trained to evaluate their works on the hard empirical evidence of using a technical system in reality provides them also with the mindset and toolbox to thoroughly question other fields' scientific theories.
Those two points may help explain why there are on the one hand engineers who do not question anything and are submissive to non-engineering science while one the other hands engineers show brilliance in uncovering bogus science in fields as economics or nutrition.
7/13/16, 11:53 PM
Peter Wilson said...
But anyway, I agree with you about climate activists. I had friends in the climate activism movement in my country. I remember making a special (albeit fossil-fueled) trip up to the capital city to advise them. I advised them to build their footpaths where people walked, and to treat the climate problem as an energy problem. As in, taking it back to physics. I was stared at blankly, and came to the conclusion that they were more interested in selling carbon guilt to the middle classes, which of course, would never sell at all.
7/14/16, 12:10 AM
Sven said...
The golden rice technology is available free of charge in the developing world. The interest of the biotech companies involved in its production has more to do with absorbing billions in aid money to develop it in the first place, plus a smattering of PR opportunities and avoiding cognitive dissonance when they claim to be feeding the world.
7/14/16, 12:17 AM
DiSc said...
They do tend to see current news as essentially bad solutions to clear problems, and are indeed embarassing to anybody with a college-level or
high-school level background in the humanities.
The same applies by and large to economists.
The problem these days is of course that engineers and economists have the clout and the resources to force their myopic solutions onto the rest of us.
The problem is also that the other side of our culture - the humanists - see their field in the same terms as the scientists do: an expensive past-time for the affluent.
They seem to have forgotten that a liberal education makes you (potentially) a better person, with a deeper understanding of the world around you,
and enables you to make better decisions about your life.
7/14/16, 12:21 AM
Scotlyn said...
7/14/16, 12:28 AM
flute said...
I think it often comes down to having a focused education in one field and not caring about other fields. I've seen so many examples of this among engineer friends and colleagues. Especially when you mention resource constraints they start arguing about e.g. fusion power and maglevs. I am an engineer, but when I was around 18 I also decided to go through the library and learn a bit about every subject, something I've kept up since then. I think that kind of approach should be mandatory for students in all fields. Many engineering students of course will hate studying totally "irrelevant" subjects such as egyptology, but in the long run it will broaden their mindset.
As I see it, too much focus nowadays is on education for a certain specialised job. What the world needs is more erudition instead of education.
7/14/16, 12:28 AM
patriciaormsby said...
On the inability you have noted of engineers to question the starting point of their investigations, you have cleared up something that has been a profound mystery to me. How could an entire government agency staffed with dozens of highly competent scientists start with a set of premises regarding the collapse of a certain engineered facility, provided to them by politicians with clear political motives and personal interests, and--never questioning it--proceed to construct elaborate explanations and models for how it must have occurred, and when their best model fails to reproduce the observed behavior in test runs, disregard it and present their explanation to the public as an unassailable truth? Of course, you know what I am talking about, and also why I don't name it for fear of slanting readers' opinions. Politics as it stands says you cannot touch this topic with a ten-foot pole, and I am sure any secretly dissenting scientists among that group, if they exist, are clearly aware of that fact.
A few months ago, in discussing social justice activism, you cleared up another mystery for me. I had a dear acquaintance, now deceased, who was a humanitarian activist. She introduced me to Amnesty International. I thought the world of her, and yet her personal relationships within her family were dreadful enough that I strongly suspect her of sociopathy. She was terribly manipulative, and two of her four children were likewise, with the other two being terribly neurotic in response. Since what I've read about sociopathy leads me to think such people would not do anything that did not provide them real rewards, I wondered about her apparent altruism. Now I have a better idea of what she was getting in return for her activism.
And finally, the assignment two weeks ago was just such a brilliant idea. Reading objectionable material as a group like that was so much more fun than slogging through it alone. Having not been able to access the whole book I chose, I am motivated to find other objectionable articles and read them. It is important to know exactly what the opposition is saying and what their form of argumentation is. To try to counter them without doing them the favor of seeing what they are actually saying only weakens one's own argument.
Furthermore, the Net has produced so many distinct echo chambers, where we all go skipping off in our own favorite direction with nothing much to bring us back to reality. It is very important to read stuff you disagree with.
(The Indonesian novel I initially selected for the assignment has not disappointed either: within three pages, I had a florid vocabulary for cell phone use. I am having a lot of fun reading it, though. Real slow going at this stage--I liken this point of language learning to a rocket launch. All the parts assembled, and now, real sustained effort to get it going. Those of you who have not learned a new language--you don't know what you are missing! it is really worth the effort.)
7/14/16, 12:34 AM
patriciaormsby said...
7/14/16, 12:38 AM
Cortes said...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/12/dont-eat-the-yellow-rice-the-danger-of-deploying-vitamin-a-golden-rice/
On "trust us, we're scientists", I was reminded of the "Great Simplification" which follows the nuclear war in Walter Miller's classic "A Canticle for Leibowitz."
Another excellent essay: thank you, JMG.
7/14/16, 12:43 AM
Spanish fly said...
Of course, I don't want to sacralize the argument of auctorithy in real science. It's suspiciously like Pope infalibility...
By the way, I suspect that some of the monomanyacal histeria abour fast collapse in peak oil people is caused by high % peakers that are hard scientists and engineers. These nerds usually don't know much History or Social Sciences (or even worse, they despise them) so they fail in applying 'Hubberts bell' to real world...
OK
Bad times for Platonic King-Philosophers, unless they live hikikomori style...
Hail Eris!
7/14/16, 2:08 AM
Scotlyn said...
If you consider the patriarchal tropes current in Victorian times - "who can understand how women think" and "who can resist a woman's wiles" - you can see the power dynamic at play. A man had so many legal and other means to directly disadvantage a woman, and therefore to directly pursue his own interest in his relations with women, that he could absolutely dispense with making any effort to understand her point of view or interest. For her part, having all direct routes to pursuing her interests blocked, a number of indirect routes present themselves. The impact of her use of them on the men in her life would be perceived by them as "wiles".
The point of this worked example is to show that having the wherewithal (money, influence, institutional support, public prejudice in your favour, capacity to inflict pain or disadvantage with a minimum of consequence) to pursue your interests DIRECTLY is to have power, and consequently, the ability to be clueless about the interests and values of people who can only pursue their interests INDIRECTLY, by, in some way, managing YOU, and accessing power through YOU.
There are some obvious consequences here:
The less powerful you are in a relationship, the more time you are likely to spend studying the values and interests of the other, as such study is key to all INDIRECT routes to the pursuit of your values and interests. But also, the better you are able to understand the other, and sometimes, the more likely you are to empathise with the other.
The more powerful you are in a relationship, the less interested you will be in studying the values and interests of the other, and ALSO, should you develop any curiosity in this regard, the less likely you will be to actually hear truths from them. YOU are yourself both the obstacle and the means to the other's direct pursuit of their interests, and the more this is the case, the less likely they are to risk your displeasure or vengeance by giving you their truth.
In these comments, I use "relationship" both in the personal sense and in the class/interest group sense, although in real life, the terrain these encompass between any specific two people is messy and complicated.
7/14/16, 3:15 AM
Chloe said...
That issue of complexity goes some way to explaining the issue scientists have discerning between facts and value judgements. Facts do illuminate situations: the question of immigration looks very different if it seems to benefit a community or harm it. It's very tempting to believe, from there, that if you simply follow the evidence you will reach a point where all the facts are laid out for you, naturally weighted, and showing you precisely what you must do. I suspect Tyson, if challenged, would be willing to admit that we don't currently have enough evidence to make all the right decisions, but would insist that such a point is reachable - and the current situation looks much the same regardless of whether he's right, or right in principle but wrong in practice, or flat-out wrong. That it's the last is only clear if you understand that the evidence which gave the "right" answer already existed within a value framework (Which community? What benefit? What harm?) and, as we've established, scientific education doesn't cover that particularly well.
(If your calculations tell you that throwing a cat off the roof will kill it, that may tell you it's wrong to throw the cat, but only on the implicit understanding that it's wrong to kill the cat in the first place.)
Then again, there are aspects of scientific thinking that are very applicable to politics. Physicists and engineers I can excuse, but it's always a disappointment when biologists fail to note that politics (a game of self- and in-group interest reliant on competition, strategic cooperation, occasional altruism, and various forms of predation, parasitism and mutualism) follows many of the same basic rules as natural selection, and for much the same reason, following the intermediates of human behaviour and psychology. Scientists tend to make the mistake of assuming all people think like scientists, when of course all people - including scientists - think like people; and I suppose many engineering majors chose their field to get away from that. But the way people think is another of those areas that can, theoretically, be understood and explained in terms of fact and evidence, and this can to some extent inform the choices you make. You just can't draw any value judgements from it.
7/14/16, 3:20 AM
YCS said...
The stupidity goes every way it seems. Engineers are awfully uncritical about the human implications of solutions, I had a fellow engineering friend who suggested that we should simply outsource all production to the robots and cut human population to one-tenth. When I started dismantling his argument using the very systems engineering methodologies we both had learnt, he got very hot under the collar.
Us engineering students simply loathe all law and commerce grads. Most of us think that these lot have no problem-solving tools and see everything as process, and not function. You can see this in the typical places lawyers go: Government, where they run around in circles and in tangents from, but nowhere near the actual huge problems.
Perhaps the reason so many climate change deniers see the evidence as being consensus based, i.e. apply the political method, is because so many scientists apply the scientific method to their political opinions.
My point is that no one tool is good for every situation: as an engineer, I understand very little about ecology or the law, so I think we should leave those decisions and counsel to them. The problems occur when (as I see it) a certain subset of society makes all the decisions. In the Anglosphere, that means that certain types of humanities professionals (lawyers and economics) make all decisions, including health, infrastructure, and investment. When was the last time the Health Minister was an actual health professional? This, as expected leads to disasterous results. A society run exclusively by engineers or economists or any other group would be just as bad.
We need people with wide-ranging multidisciplinary knowledge. That's why I positioned myself in a double degree, learning both engineering and arts.
YCS
7/14/16, 3:21 AM
[email protected] said...
It has been fascinating watching the post-Brexit fallout and the inability of many in the Remain camp to accept that there were very good and logical reasons why the majority of Brits voted to leave the EU.
It is also rather amusing to watch the establishment backtrack on their Project Fear statements, including hikes in interest rates (from the Bank of England Governor), a "punishment" budget (backtracked by Philip Hammond yesterday) and indeed the future of the City where the big banks are now saying has a bright future after all.
The rage of the Remain camp and their media cheerleaders has been expressed in some brutal ageist and classist attacks on the poorer and older members of society. The smug upper-middle class elites who run Britain have shown their true colours and I'm sure the working classes have noticed the contempt shown.
The Left in Britain is currently imploding with the Labour Party in civil war. Paradoxically, it is the Right who seem to have better adapted to the new populist rage surging through Britain with the new Prime Minister Theresa May speech a masterclass in empathy for the ordinary working man or woman struggling. I see the same signs in the United States, where Donald Trump, despite his flaws, is clearly better at connecting with the same sense of frustration and insecurities which so many feel about modern American life. The Left, which has largely been taken over by identity politics, doesn't seem able to communicate with the working classes anymore.
Certainly interesting times. For those who wish to follow the post-Brexit debate further, you are welcome to follow my blog (https://forecastingintelligence.wordpress.com/)
Keep up the good work John. I look forward to reading your further posts, in particular an update on the Saudi Arabia situation, which you think is heading towards collapse. Would be interested to know your thoughts on when this may happen and what the implications would be for global economics and geopolitics.
Thanks
James
7/14/16, 3:32 AM
Mark In Mayenne said...
7/14/16, 3:32 AM
Mark In Mayenne said...
7/14/16, 3:42 AM
Phil Harris said...
I think you have left out my other prejudice: chemists or rather those working in chemical science. I judge chemists are worth a special mention. ;-)
(I have a soft spot for engineers – some of my very best friends have been engineers ;-) One very good friend used what I can only call ‘creative magic’ (with reference to discussions on your other blog) to conjure reliable working devices of great subtlety and brilliance which he was pleased to find he could not entirely understand. He was really shrewd about reality! But like many of his tribe he was very gullible. Think for example 2012 end-of-the-world and all that.)
I am surprised however those chemists have not seen us all off – inadvertently as it were, especially post Second World War. I have experienced close-up conviction chemists’ arguments about everything from DDT, dioxins and other xenobiotics and metal contaminations through to projections for the future limitless combinations and permutations that their world consists of. One trick is to take over biology. Molecular biology is a truly fascinating extension of biochemistry and ‘promises’ (help!) to be all-encompassing. These hardnosed children are let loose in a limitless treasure house with permutations and combinations that obey their rules. May the Gods of Progress look after them!
And some of these true-believer science guys - chemists especially in my experience ;-) - deny Climate Science of course!
best
Phil H
7/14/16, 4:31 AM
Phil Harris said...
Confession to follow my commentjust now on my own preferred prejudice.
In another life I used mol biol as a practical tool and then spent 10 years in national risk assessment of the genetically engineered ‘next wave of the future’ as a minor cog in the nascent ‘global’ regulatory machinery.
Conclusions? Well 20 years ago I wrote a chapter on biotech regulation wherein most of the arguments you list in this week’s blog figured, along with a few others – I think you have the nub of it and hope some of it sticks.
Second conclusion? Scientists have great deal of trouble doing risk assessments. Without knowing much of history of philosophy I diagnosed back then ‘logical positivism’. How can one do risk assessment if our true knowledge is limited to what we can agree is proved (strong version) by scientific method?
best
Phil H
7/14/16, 4:37 AM
Don Plummer said...
7/14/16, 4:48 AM
James Gemmill said...
Yayyyyyy!!! I'm in. Best use for the credit card in I don't know how long.
7/14/16, 4:48 AM
Alan B said...
Very interesting and thought-provoking, thank you. Being an engineer myself, I'm around engineers a lot, and I've noticed the propensity you describe. While education probably plays some role, I wonder if a larger contribution is the personality type that is attracted to engineering as profession. In other words, correlation vs. causality.
Alan
7/14/16, 4:58 AM
. said...
“Wars are conceived of, started by, and beneficial to the upper classes. They are fought by and murderous of the lower classes.”
That’s just not true of all wars everywhere ever. The Irish war of independence wasn’t like that, nor was our civil war. The Russian civil war killed huge numbers of the existing upper class and installed a new one. I don’t think the Rwandan genocide fits that pattern either. Revolutions are different to wars are different to civil wars.
Mallow.
7/14/16, 5:07 AM
A Post-Millennial said...
Just a quick question about the monthly print edition of your blog posts, will you be printing a selection of comments along with them? Sort of like a "correspondence section?""
No we won't. We had considered doing this, but realized that JMG's posts get far too comments for that to be feasible. Every page costs us money, and unless people are willing to pay more than $3/issue, we have to limit this to just JMG's articles.
"Wendy Crim
I was all ready to order a six month subscription to print version but it only has PayPal as payment. I don't do PayPal. Maybe this will change?"
The vendor we're using only offers Paypal and a service called Stripe to process credit cards. If we set up Stripe would you be able to order a subscription, or is the issue that you're wanting to pay in some form other than a credit card? Why don't you email us at stonecirclepress(at)riseup(dot)net and we can discuss this further there.
7/14/16, 5:17 AM
peacegarden said...
“Back” to the future, so to speak!
Peace,
Gail
7/14/16, 5:18 AM
Leon said...
Complex social systems are, well, pretty complex and usually non-linear, so locking people up for 10 years for jaywalking may work great on Feb 29th and be really counterproductive the rest of the time. Also, I suspect the right answers are extremely local and may or may not be right in the next town.
Every time I tried to find a definite general scientific answer to a practical policy question I found only a few social scientists or economists fighting over it in the narrow crevasses of their areas of expertise. In my first shock over how little benefit the society actually receives from all the effort to study this stuff I concluded the distinguished academicians were just incompetent frauds. Later I realized that some systems are just too complex for finding reliable patterns by using scientific approach. Which by the way, still makes them "scientists" incompetent frauds - how can you possibly do something all your life and not notice that you haven't produced a single useful answer? :)
7/14/16, 5:25 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
[http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/]
He has has been writing passionately about and against The War On Science for some time, because he sees it as the last hope of humankind. Now, Brin is one of those people to whom "what must be done" is utterly obvious - just ask him - and he is also deeply committed to the value of science and the values of The Enlightenment, democracy, and "the diamond-shaped economic pyramid."
The combination means he is either totally baffled as to why people are reacting as they do, or he seeks and has found a villain. To him, it's all a plot by would-be aristocrats who want a return to the days when a small minority was on top and the classes descended pyramid-style from there. He understands why they should want to do so - raw self-interest - but is begging his readers to help stop them.
7/14/16, 6:03 AM
Esn said...
If you want a case study of what happens when scientists are given the ruling reins... look the former Soviet Bloc.
I've been following the politics of former Eastern (communist) Europe for a long time. When the USSR and its allies collapsed, hundreds of thousands of scientists suddenly became considered redundant by their societies, and many had to find new employment (it was perhaps the first big collapse of a "science bubble", and might portend what will one day happen in the West).
Quite a lot of those scientists (particularly physicists and mathematicians, it seems) became politicians, and some rose to leadership positions. Some examples: Angela Merkel (East Germany), Viktor Yushchenko (Ukraine), Askar Akayev (Kyrgyzstan), Boris Nemtsov (Russia).
The pattern I seem to see is that the politicians from scientific backgrounds have made memorable yet disastrous political leaders, with tendencies towards idealism and principles that initially make them popular... unfortunately, accompanied by blinkered dogmatism, treating people as things, staying on a particular path long after the point where it should've become obvious to anyone that a course correction is needed, and brutal dismissal of opposing voices even if the price is destroying one's own country (you can definitely see that in the leaderships of Merkel, Yushchenko and Akayev - all of whom slowly and methodically sowed the seeds for their country's destruction, most visibly in Ukraine - and Nemtsov would've likely done likewise if he'd been higher up the ladder and had been allowed to stay longer).
The most effective (longest-lasting and most internally popular) political leaders in Eastern Europe seem to have come from very different spheres: sociology/agriculture (Orban), agriculture (Lukashenko), secret service (Putin), metallurgy (Nazarbayev). Perhaps the one thing all of those fields have in common is that they require working closely with, and for, other people...
(also, an honourable mention for "professions that make horrible politicians" goes to chess players. Exhibit A: Garry Kasparov, who has managed to alienate almost everybody even on his own "side" and made his own causes toxic among the population he claims to speak for. See also Bobby Fischer, though he never actually tried to get elected. If anything, chess players are even worse politicians than physicists and mathematicians, but they're so comically horrible at it that the chance of one actually reaching power appears to be nil)
7/14/16, 6:14 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
7/14/16, 6:15 AM
Erik Buitenhuis said...
"Fifteen years ago, the [climate change activism] movement to stop anthropogenic climate change was a juggernaut".
7/14/16, 6:16 AM
Scotlyn said...
Shorter version of this thought: might an ecologist be a better politician?
7/14/16, 6:44 AM
Twilight said...
In the end this comes down to individual personalities and is merely another symptom of our society’s extreme level of specialization. Some people look for the big picture, while others prefer to get lost in details, and our society greatly encourages the latter in all areas. Sadly, when those who’ve spent a lifetime focused on very a few narrow areas belatedly begin to sense that things may be going wrong in other areas they are often poorly equipped to assimilate and respond to those problems. The natural tendency is to apply the things that have worked for them, even if that is irrelevant. If all you have is a hammer...
Still, this is going on everywhere, and I watch the people around me become more and more dependent on a virtual, specialized, interconnected world at the same time the cracks in the foundations of that world grow wider by the day. There are no generalists, eyes are willingly held tightly closed to all the rude intrusions of reality, and it is hard to imagine a population less equipped to deal with problems from outside of their narrow specialty, let alone multiple failures of many other systems and infrastructure.
7/14/16, 6:45 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
7/14/16, 6:51 AM
Venkataraman Amarnath said...
7/14/16, 6:54 AM
Nastarana said...
Dear Gottfreid, The oligarchy have means to compel obedience, as we saw in Greece last summer. Sad, but true. What I think happened is that Sen. Sanders was persuaded that a Trump presidency would be Bad for Israel.
However, conditions on the ground which fed the Sanders and Trump insurgencies have not gone away. If Clintonistas imagine they can put out a grass fire by stomping on the match which provided the spark...I think they might live to regret that assumption.
7/14/16, 7:13 AM
Tom Schmidt said...
I keep a handy reference to Jane Jacobs' Systems of Survival, her book originally to be titled Raiders and Traders. Traders, the merchants, operate by one syndrome, which includes things like "be honest" and "be open to new ideas and people." Under Jacobs' syndrome, scientists are traders. I illustrate this point for my students with this question: "what do you call a scientist who falsifies data? Not a scientist."
Guardians live by another syndrome. They follow precepts like "deceive for the sake of the task," and "treasure honor." Jacobs argues that traders and guardians are both needed to have a functioning society. La Wik adds: "Conflicts occur, according to Jacobs, when the precepts appropriate to one syndrome are applied to the other. This always generates problems. Furthermore, it is inevitable that problematic intermixing of the syndromes will occur over time, resulting in what she refers to as monstrous moral hybrids."
Imagine telling a police officer, a guardian, that he should be efficient and raise revenue, too, not support justice and social peace. You get Ferguson, MO, where 25% of the city budget was raised through traffic fines. Then, even when a police officer legitimately tries to keep the peace, he is attacked in his patrol car and winds up shooting a man who should have seen the police not as government highway robbers, but legitimate force. The city burns.
Scientists who attempt to use the force of the state eye become guardians, a monstrous moral hybrid. One problem with climate change is that it is phrased like a sin in the religion of Progressivism. Those opposed to accepting it know well that the power elite wants to use the "Science" to show them not just as people needing to change and adapt, but as Sinners. That becomes a religious/guardian issue. Science is concerned with true and false, and religion with right and wrong. Both are necessary to a properly functioning society.
The corruption of science can belaid at the feet of the politicians who turned it into a government-supported enterprise. The Federal government supplies about 1/7th of the money spent annually at Higher Education in America, but every dollar spent by an institution receiving Federal funds must comply with Federal rules. This has turned university science into an arm of the State, the ultimate guardian institution. Ultimately, the wage class knows who is paying for the scientist: the salary class that runs the State. This is an utter disaster going forward, and you're right: cosseted scientists like Tyson cannot see it.
7/14/16, 7:15 AM
Chris Smith said...
Not only does Trump not care about the working class, he is a snake oil salesman. The 1950s and 1960s were great for the American working class*. Trump tells us he's going to bring the jobs back. He even said in Pennsylvania a few weeks ago that he is going to bring steel back.
This of course ignores two facts (IMHO). First, that post war boom happened in part because our industry wasn't destroyed during the war. We were the only ones who could fill everybody's orders. This is no longer the case. Second, and more important, we do not have enough resources for everyone on the planet to live 1960s middle class US lifestyle, and the rest of the people on the planet aren't going to put up with living in deprivation and penury so that we can maintain our lifestyle.
Sure, people want to believe that we can go back to the way it was, but it wasn't isn't and won't be sustainable. But then again, it's easier to sell "morning in America" then it is to sell "turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater."
And lest anyone think I in any way, shape, or form support Clinton, she is selling the same sort of snake oil to the salary class. That is, that things can go on like this forever with improvements made by tinkering around the edges. Good luck with that.
As for violent insurrection Bill, I don't get that either.
* There is a racial dimension to this, but its too complicated and too important for a glib treatment.
7/14/16, 7:19 AM
RPC said...
7/14/16, 7:36 AM
Paulo said...
Another person I know is an engineer. He was deeply offended when I told him that as an experienced tradesman, engineers were just another problem we had to work around, and that many actually knew very little of the scope and sequence of how a building goes up, or how a project is completed. One day, a Govt engineer came to inspect a fish hatchery I helped construct, (I was the foreman). He remarked that we had put in the plumbing on the 'wrong' side of the building. I replied that to install it as designed we would have had to make several tight 90 degree turns and pass under the driveway. We would have also had to do more drilling/blasting through bedrock. The way we installed it gave us a straight shot into the building, used less pipe, was easier to install, and offered less friction and better flows for the rearing areas. He demanded we redo it. I refused, as it was by now all under concrete. We argued, and then finally got to the nitty gritty of the matter. His reasoning for wanting us to redo the installation was that it was the way he had drawn it up on the blueprints. The construction had to conform to the blueprints. I told him that his design was wrong, and that it was easier to redo the blueprints and do a 'mirror image' of the plumbing installation than change the building around. We call that doing an 'as built' drawing. He was a Fisheries engineer and probably would not have survived in Industry. Nevertheless, he had the degree and people usually followed his orders.
Another engineer (boyfriend of my wife's friend) remarked to me with irritation in his voice that he simply did not understand why the 2nd crossing of Burrard Inlet (Vancouver) was called the Ironworkers Bridge? It offended him as he did not like ironworkers. (Sometimes, they are pretty hard to like). He was from Toronto and did not know our local history. Anyway, I told him it was because so many ironworkers died in the construction of the bridge due to a faulty design and project construction plan. He denied that the bridge had ever collapsed and that a properly engineered bridge could never fall down if details were adhered to. I told him to go and look it up....and have never heard back from him.
These three examples are people who have had years of authority linked to their training and job title, reinforced by people who had not questioned them, ever. In politics, and life, such rigidity is an accident waiting to happen.
7/14/16, 7:46 AM
John Roth said...
Right on. The only benefit of wars and collapses is they clear out a whole lot of rubbish so people have to start over. The cost, on the other hand, is horrendous. You’d think we’d have learned enough to actually grow our social systems rather than crash, burn, pick up and repeat.
@Weogo
Every oral culture will tell you that their oral histories are accurate. The cases where oral memory can be compared against written records say is simply isn’t so. Studies of how stories get transmitted show there are certain things that are needed to keep a story stable, and certain things tend to change in very specific ways.
32,000 years ago is at least 50% too long, and probably a lot more, for a tribe in Canada.
@Team10tim:
No real grammarian will tell you that a preposition at the end of the sentence is wrong. The people who tell you that are called “peevers.”
Re: Dawkins
JMG, you’re right about what Dawkins is saying; the counterpoint is that it doesn’t work that way. Dawkins is on one end of an argument in evolutionary theory on the unit of evolution between people who believe that the individual is the only unit, and people who believe that populations have a validity beyond the individuals who make them up. It’s called group selection, and Dawkins was against it.
@Gottfried etc.
Idealism is all very well, but sooner or later you have to face reality. As last seen, most of Sanders’ base had shifted to Hillary anyway. See the analysis at fivethirtyeight.com: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/sanderss-endorsement-may-help-among-his-most-anti-clinton-supporters/
7/14/16, 7:55 AM
Keith Hammer said...
7/14/16, 7:56 AM
Shane W said...
I'm baffled why you seem to have such a "charge" over the cycles of history taking place. A lot like King Canute trying to stop the tides. Whether you jump up and down and throw a fit or not makes not one whit of difference in the cycling of history in our society. Likewise, whether you jump up and down, swear, scream, have a stroke or heart attack will have no bearing at all on my decision to volunteer for the Trump campaign. I fully expect as much from people, and am prepared for the reaction, if I even choose to share my decision with others.
You seem to have missed the part where I discussed my ambivalence. I totally agree that it may be entirely possible that Trump sells out his supporters, but I fully believe that if that happens, his supporters will form the insurgency. I'm not really interested in stopping the tides, Bill, but trying to figure out the tides and surfing them. To me, Hillary is an unacceptable alternative that will unquestionably lead to Civil War or war with Russia, or both, and if there's even the remotest chance that Trump may follow through on some of his campaign promises, he should be given the opportunity to do so. Honestly, Bill, I'm not so much of a war monger as you are making me out to be, in that I think that Trump is our best sliver of hope to avert insurgency, and should be given an opportunity.
7/14/16, 7:58 AM
Allie said...
One nitpick I had with the Leave camp in the Brexit vote was their mostly dishonest claim that you quoted: “the right of people to self-determination must be protected from the encroachments of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.” The term 'unelected' isn't true. All of the legislative and executive institutions of the EU operating out of Brussels are made up of elected officials. The main ones:
The EU Parliament by direct vote of the citizenry of the member countries.
The EU Council that is made up of the heads of state of each member country, who are all in their position due to their parties or coalitions being voted into power by their countries citizens.
The Council of the EU (not to be confused with the EU Council above). It is the other legislative body of the EU. It is made up of the executive governments of the member states. Those governments are elected by their national parliaments, who were in turn elected by their citizenry.
The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the EU treaties and managing the day-to-day business of the EU. There is one member per member state. One of the 28 is the Commission President proposed by the European Council and elected by the European Parliament. The Council of the European Union then nominates the other 27 members of the Commission in agreement with the nominated President, and the 28 members as a single body are then subject to a vote of approval by the European Parliament.
As you see, everyone is technically elected. It's just that, as you see from my descriptions above, it all gets rather derivative in a hurry. The guy who is in charge of the day to day biz is elected by another guy who was elected by this other dude, who you voted for in the last national elections. And being so far detached from direct elections, it might as well be unelected. Trying to nitpick on that technical inaccuracy results in this long winded description that just makes peoples eyes glaze over and they think to themselves "I can't wait to vote leave."
Now the European Central Bank is a totally unelected institution and it isn't based in Brussels. Also since the UK isn't in the Eurozone it isn't directly impacted by the ECB and more than it is impacted by the Federal Reserve.
I wish there had been more realistic talk from the Leave camp for making the UK more self reliant with important things like domestic food production. They currently import about 40% of their needs. But again, I'm just nitpicking. I think they did the right thing...I just don't think the Leave leaders have any sort of real plan after the vote.
Lastly, thank you so much for mentioning that awful open letter about Golden Rice. I would simply add to your comments about interests and values, the statement "golden rice doesn't work as advertised" is a fact. The field tests in the Philippines in 2012-2013 failed to produce the same yields as commercial strains. And didn't have significantly more vitamin A.
https://source.wustl.edu/2016/06/genetically-modified-golden-rice-falls-short-lifesaving-promises/
http://gmwatch.org/news/latest-news/16043-golden-rice-is-it-vaporware
http://www.march-against-monsanto.com/genetically-modified-golden-rice-15-years-of-failure/
7/14/16, 8:02 AM
Professor Diabolical said...
There is a cornucopia of things that don't fit into the standard scientific theory of earth evolution, and they are all locked away as assiduously as The Man in the Iron Mask, "Those-facts-who-shall-not-be-named" if you will. Q: What scientist looks at ill-fitting evidence and says, "hey, I'd better stay as far away from understanding that as possible"? A: All of them. Every field has career-ending taboos and lines of inquiry, with 300 tenure applicants clawing up the ladder behind you. You couldn't build a better system to prevent honest investigation if you tried. It was only in my childhood that tectonic plate theory was a tinfoil hat theory refuted by honorable geologists despite the self-evident appearance of the African and South American coasts. Then one day, scientists had always ascribed to plate theory and the tinfoil hats were the ones who didn't believe it.
So is there evidence that would support the young earth theory, or at least radically re-write existing theory? Absolutely. And that's why they'll never look at it. But don't worry: if they someday change their minds, they'll always have been right, and you'll still have always been wrong -- the ultimate appeal to authority.
7/14/16, 8:26 AM
over the hill and down the other side said...
Somewhere I read this definition of science: Science is a series of statements that have not yet been disproven.
Coming from the intuitive/feeling side of perception, these mainline official scientists come across to me as insufferable priests of materialist religion.. The engineering side of science too obsessed with control from a basis of arrogance. No one seems to notice how the "verities" have changed from epoch to epoch! Or that "fudging" has to go on with facts and measurements .
This, I believe, is in violation of the principles of science as skeptical inquiry.
This violation seems to begin with the definition of something as a "problem." Anything defined as a problem must have a solution.
In political terms, this always leads to what was said to be Stalin's "solution." No people. No problem.
"People" being those "irrational" folks who create situations and predicaments which frustrate "problem solvers."
7/14/16, 8:41 AM
nrgmiserncaz said...
As an Engineer, I found this highly relevant to my day-to-day existence. I'm an oddball however, as I've straddled the Engineering/Business Development/Sales & Marketing walls for many years. The advantage is that I come to discussions with a bit more of a values bent so my perspective is often VERY different than my Engineering peers.
We have any number of highly trained, well educated folks that have multiple Master's degrees or Ph.D's but who suffer from ignorance about both sides of the coin you've discussed - politics vs. science. I have guys that are absolutely dismissive of science-based notions like climate change, peak oil, environmental degradation, etc. even in the face of actual facts they could understand and assimilate.
Meanwhile, they also have complete disdain for human emotion or perception. I often have to explain that winning a bid for work often has more to do with perception of our capabilities (true or not), how well we get along with their Engineers or how crazy our ideas are to potentially conservative buyers. The buyer sees risk where the Engineer sees innovation.
This also goes to the argument between atheists and philosophy where the crowd of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al seem to think everything can be solved by science but I'm more inclined to think that many things in life are value judgments and will never be solved by science.
Your rice example is a wonderful nod to this and is the kind of issue I discuss with the Engineers I work with to no avail. To them , the GMO thing is simple and logical. If it's deemed scientifically safe and is legal to sell, then it should be done, period, regardless of the "feeling" of the "crazy liberals". Trying to get them to see the impact this can have on autonomy or income inequality is met with fierce resistance.
As the VP of our organization (BS Physics/ MS Elec. Eng) told me regarding working class people and jobs, "if people don't have jobs, that's not my problem".
7/14/16, 8:43 AM
Varun Bhaskar said...
You have a knack for talking about ideas that should be taught in the social sciences. I hope you don't mind me using your idea for the “Political Method,” it's a brilliant way to teach politics to the uninitiated.
When I was working in India, I attended a defense conference where a professor from South Asia University talked about how engineering colleges are breeding grounds for terrorists. He went on to describe, in some detail, about all the flaws in the curriculum that caused young students from engineering fields to become radicalized. Then he went on to point out that the relationship between engineering eduction and terrorism wasn't just limited to Islamic terrorism. He had gone back and done his research and found a trend all the way back to the communist uprisings in the early 1900s. He ended by calling for a deep reform of the educational system in South Asia to combat terrorism. Obviously, no such reform has taken place.
Also, here's an article I wrote about immigration that is definitely a value-interest argument. The Diminishing Returns of Immigration.
Regards,
Varun Bhaskar
7/14/16, 8:51 AM
spinozarina smith said...
I suspect the compartmentalization of academic fields – particularly the “hard” sciences - drives this non-holistic approach but because they are rewarded financially they must be right!
Another observation: I am old enough to have had years of drafting in HS and later learned AutoCAD. I suspect – in a pinch - doctors “can” do what nurses do, lawyers “can” so what their para-legal does but IMO there are very few engineers [at least the civils I’ve worked with] that can draw anything using AutoCAD. They can read a set of plans but are unable to actually produce them.
7/14/16, 8:55 AM
donalfagan said...
Academia has a huge money problem
Too many studies are poorly designed
Replicating results is crucial — and rare
Peer review is broken
Too much science is locked behind paywalls
Science is poorly communicated
Life as a young academic is incredibly stressful
Ironically, Vox noted this was not a scientific survey.
http://www.vox.com/2016/7/14/12016710/science-challeges-research-funding-peer-review-process
7/14/16, 8:56 AM
Hereward said...
From the Piscean era characterized by emotion, depth and devotion, but also dogma, the water in the pitcher is emptied out and replaced by what appears at first to be a breath of fresh air. New thinking and rationality take over and this appears to be all to the good. However, as the fixed version of the element of air, contained as it is by the pitcher, the attempt is made to systematize everything, which is all well and good for the sciences, but quickly comes unstuck when the same process is applied to politics, economics, religion, art etc. We then become imprisoned by our own rigid thought constructs.
This all begs the question of how we might expect this age to develop. What might the world look like a thousand years from now? No doubt you had (something like) this in your mind when you set the challenge for the space bats competition last year.
It further begs the question of what, if anything, can be done to avoid the impending train wreck? On a personal level, fore-warned can be said to be fore-armed, but the wheels of Hamlet's Mill are ever turning and will trace out their arc no matter what. Presumably, therefore, humanity as a whole is strapped in and can do little else but sit back and 'enjoy' the ride.
7/14/16, 9:07 AM
Shane W said...
7/14/16, 9:10 AM
dermot said...
'Study of Man' Michael Polanyi p.37
I have moved deliberately from facts to values and from science to the arts, in order to surprise you with the result; namely, that our powers of understanding control equally both these domains. This continuity was actually foreshadowed from the moment that I acknowledged intellectual passion as a proper motive of comprehension. The moment the ideal of detached knowledge was abandoned, it was inevitable that the ideal of dispassionateness should eventually follow, and that with it the supposed cleavage between dispassionate knowledge of fact and impassioned valuation of beauty should vanish.
A continuous transition from observation to valuation can actually be carried out within science itself, and indeed within the exact sciences, simply by moving from physics to applied mathematics and then further to pure mathematics. Even physics, though based on observation, relies heavily on a sense of intellectual beauty. No one who is unresponsive to such beauty can hope to make an important discovery in mathematical physics, or even to gain a proper understanding of its existing theories. In applied mathematics - for example in aerodynamics - observation is much attenuated and the mathematical interest often predominates; and when we arrive at pure mathematics, for example, number theory, observation is effaced altogether and experience is alluded to only quite dimly in the conception of integers. Pure mathematics presents us with a vast intellectual structure, built up altogether for the sake of enjoying it as a dwelling place of our understanding. It has no other purpose; whoever does not love and admire mathematics for its own internal splendours, knows nothing whatever about it.
And from here there is but a short step to the abstract arts to music. Music is a complex pattern of sounds constructed for the joy of understanding it. Music, like mathematics, dimly echoes past experience, but has no definite bearing on experience. It develops the joy of its understanding into an extensive gamut of feelings, known only to those specially gifted and educated to understand its structure intimately. Mathematics is conceptual music - music is sensuous mathematics.
And so we could go on extending our perspective, until it took in the entire range of human thought. For the whole universe of human sensibility - of our intellectual, moral, artistic, religious ideas - is evoked, in the way illustrated for music and mathematics, by dwelling within the framework of our cultural heritage. Thus our acknowledgment of understanding as a valid form of knowledge foreshadows the promised transition from the study of nature to a confrontation with man acting responsibly, under an over-arching firmament of universal ideas.
*
And here he attacks the brute scientism of this time (which is a feature again shared with Midgley):
*
p.20 I agree that the process of understanding leads beyond - indeed far beyond - what a strict empiricism regards as the domain of legitimate knowledge; but I reject such an empiricism. If consistently applied, it would discredit any knowledge whatever and it can be upheld only by allowing it to remain inconsistent. It is permitted this inconsistency because its ruthless mutilation of human experience lends it such a high reputation for scientific severity, that its prestige overrides the defectiveness of its own foundations. Our acknowledgment of understanding as a valid form of knowing will go along way towards liberating our minds from this violent and inefficient despotism.
-
Dermot.
7/14/16, 9:21 AM
onething said...
Well, to my mind, the question went from naive acceptance of the spiritual vision in a very altered reality, to the question of hey, what if something like that really happened and how does the language in which it is described remind us of the kind of technology that we have or can imagine today, rather than what people in earlier eras could not see it as - i.e., technology? The description sounds a lot like a description of a primitive person seeing a space ship, as does some of the descriptions in Revelation describe what might be helicopters and bombers. And it isn't only in the Bible.
You spoke highly of peer review, but it also can be used to lock out opinions or research that doesn't fit an accepted agenda or even just to prevent the entrenched dogma from being shaken. What if, for example, someone came up with good arguments against the Big Bang; that would upset all sorts of apple carts. Would that pass peer review?
7/14/16, 9:34 AM
dermot said...
being Irish I'm familiar with 4 or 5 of these awful EU referenda (I've lost count), as all EU treaties must be ratified by binding referenda under the Irish constitution.
in my experience of following these, both at home and from overseas, the number of people who understood what they were voting for, based on YES/NO
YES: 0
NO: 0
There is NOBODY, barring some infinitesimal number of constitutional lawyers, who could have read and understood Maastricht, Nice, Lisbon treaties, etc.
("The party of the first part, insofar as applicable to subsection 3.4, shall, upon execution of terms, apply said entity to code 7.2, upon which the party of the second part shall thereupon etc etc etc ...")
Even assuming anyone did understand the particular treaties, there is no way that any of them could have predicted the full consequences (e.g., Irish membership of the Euro meaning loss of control over currency, leading to massive austerity post 2008). Nobody - not even the Irish Euroskeptics - who were mostly on the hard left - predicted that.
So the Refs are fought on hope & fear, usually a mix of 10% hope 90% fear, but 20/80 is sometimes approached. This isn't a bug of EU referenda, it's a feature.
Also note the irony of complaints that "the old people have voted, but it's the young who will have to live with this". Yeah, you mean like in EVERY OTHER ELECTION we've ever had? If the young couldn't be bothered to log off of Twitter for 30 minutes, then they've selected themselves out of having a say. (But of course, #notmyvote was easy enough to do). If only we could vote on Twitter.
Anyway, the idea that the REMAIN camp in the UK 'understood' what they were voting for is a hoot. They were voting for status quo, perhaps they can claim that - but even an appeal to Burkean conservatism might not apply, as the EU is the prime mover in quite quick social change these days, and ceding power to unelected Brussels bureaucrats is not something I imagine old Eddie would have been comfortable with.
The Brits could also do what the Irish gov did when the electorate voted NO. Simply run the referendum a second time. Of course, if the Tories did that, the tory party wouldn't survive a wet weekend.
-
Dermot.
7/14/16, 9:39 AM
Peter Robinson said...
The starting point of any engineering project is to carefully examine the problem to be solved - usually as stated in a customer requirement or similar document - and to decide whether this is really the problem that needs solving. Identifying and defining the problem is an essential first step in any successful engineering project. Accepting at face value what the customer thinks is the problem is a sure recipe for a failed project. Designing and implementing the right solution to the wrong problem is a career limiting move for any professional engineer, no matter whose fault it is.
Engineering is a pragmatic profession that tries to live in the real world, with all its uncertainties and imperfections.
7/14/16, 9:41 AM
Martin B said...
Strictly speaking, golden rice contains carotene, which gives it its color. Carotene is converted to vitamin A in the body. But you could just as easily get your carotene from carrots or green leafy vegetables. Developing golden rice is just a boondoggle to get funds to various research organizations. All that's really needed to get the same benefit as golden rice is to encourage healthy dietary choices.
7/14/16, 9:53 AM
onething said...
I can see that this post is going to bring some interesting opinions out of the wood work!
Does your young earth creationism relate to the Nestorian Church? Because in the larger Orthodox world, they do not and have not ever insisted upon 24 hour days for the tale in Genesis.
I always enjoy reading your thoughts.
7/14/16, 9:53 AM
anton mett said...
Chronic Migraine Treatment
• OnabotulinumtoxinA (botox)
– Approved for prophylaxis of chronic migraine (>
15 headache days/month)
*8-9 fewer HA compared to 6-7 with placebo*
– 31 injection sites into head/neck Q 3 mo.
– Boxed warning re: possibility for spread causing
weakness in distant area(s)
So one take away is that injecting botulism can result in 1-3 less headaches a month than placebo. The other lesson is that, placebo can cut down migraines nearly in half!
I work in research and I do find it funny that we only study the placebo effect in order to delete it from the results of "real" medicine.
We study it specifically so we can ignore it.
7/14/16, 9:56 AM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
Dear JMG:
====1====
(This is the FIRST in a pair of two comments. I accordingly write "====1====".)
I largely agree with your various contentions this week. In particular, you seem to be right in finding various scientists guilty of argumentum ad auctoritatem. In glancing over the pro-GMO letter, signed by over 100 Nobel laureates, I find some names appearing that look odd oven to me, working even at the very low (unpaid!) scientific level that I do, and being as poorly informed in science as I am - what on earth can be the intellectual authority of quantics laureate Cohen-Tannoudji, or Cosmic Microwave Background laureate Penzias, in a debate in agronomy? Are some physicists here behaving like municipal politicians, basking in the sense of importance that comes with getting quoted in the media?
Hastily poking also a little further this morning into the topic of physicists behaving oddly, I note a propos of climate change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soon_and_Baliunas_controversy. Follow the money, say the police detectives. Well, there is money in this story: grants to Baliunas and/or Soon from the American Petroleum Institute between 2001 and 2007 totalling 274,000 USD, and grants from Exxon Mobil totalling 335,000 USD between 2005 and 2010.
It is said that no gentleman is a hero to his valet. To this I would add, having been research assistant here and there over the years, that no prof is a hero to his or her research assistant. On the strength of minor personal observations over the years, I offer the following: The physics profs are as prone to vanity and the craving for affirmation as anyone else is, and the big-money people know this, and they are accordingly willing to stoop to manipulation. Profs who are busy, and are rather Aspergery in character, and are perhaps even a bit lonely, and are inclined to be rather trusting (they are not blessed with the deep reserves of cynicism we may hope to find in police detectives, or again in monastery abbots) make fine targets for manipulation.
This might end badly. You have indeed yourself already said so, in a 2014-11-26 posting entitled "Dark Age America: The Suicide of Science".
Hastily,
Tom
http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com
7/14/16, 9:57 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
7/14/16, 10:08 AM
Alvin Leong said...
He has also taken a hard line against GMOs and faced Monsanto harrassment in his workplace as a result.
You come at it from a slightly different angle but I think his "puddle of water" scenario in Black Swan is relevant: given an ice cube, one can predict quite reliably the shape of the puddle it will melt into; given a puddle of water on the other hand it is impossible to reverse engineer whether it was even an ice cube in the first place.
What the creationist engineers are doing seems to be deciding that it was an ice cube and then attempting to reverse engineer the evidence to show how the puddle resulted from the ice cube melting.
He calls these idiot savants "IYIs": Intellectual Yet Idiots. Intellectuals who have no skin in the game and think reality should conform to their Platonifying models rather than basing their models in reality (which also calls to my mind William James).
7/14/16, 10:18 AM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
Dear JMG:
====2====
(This is the SECOND in a pair of two comments. I accordingly write "====2====".)
Although largely agreeing with your various contentions this week, I do have to add a few brief sentences of corrective to the following remark in your current essay: /.../ specific blindness seems to be hardwired into another mode of education, one that’s both prestigious and popular these days: a scientific education—that is to say, a technical education in the theory and practice of one of the hard sciences. Although one can hardly dispute the charge of "specific blindness", it does have to be added that the current system offers not one but two cultures in "scientific education" in "the hard sciences", and that these two are dissimilar.
Take, as an illustration, the University of Toronto main ("St George") campus. (A) On the west side of St George street is the physics tower, with a nice adjacent 1950s-heritage brick lowrise for astrophysics. On the same side of the street, not too far away, although in three separate places, are three separate centres of pure mathematics - the Maths Dept, the maths library, and the Fields Institute. (B) On the east side are multiple buildings for engineering.
East is east, and west is west, said Kipling, and ne'er the twain shall meet.
I am rooted in the west-side culture. I think I speak for many when I say that the east-side culture is, on the whole, rather bad news: maths regarded as a mere tool, I believe, and connections with corporate money outright celebrated and flaunted (there is a "Hall of Fame" in one of the engineering buildings, explaining with little vitrine exhibits how Prof. I.M.Doing-Ratherwell helped develop Ontario tantalum mining, or how Prof. Plutus designed a new kind of hydraulic control for that evil which is the passenger jet).
We give the east side more respectability than it deserves, since our culture (as some other JMG ADR commentator lately remarked) fetishizes technology. The social-wellbeing truth is that we should have no home computers, no passenger jets, no private motorcars (the cops, the doctors, and the like do admittedly have to have cars), no broadcast television - that, in short, we should be back at something like the technological level we were attaining in 1914, the year future historians may well be taking as a convenient start-marker for the Collapse of Western Civ. But because technology is presently fetishized, we are tempted to paint physics as above all the search for more elementary particles, to seek an "application" even for General Relativity (there is one big application, namely GPS - but this we need just as much or as little as coffee percolators need steering wheels), and so on.
As real science commits suicide, through the unwise mass-media pronouncements of the Cohen-Tannoudjis and Penziases and Baliunases and Soons, engineering will to some extent endure. The warlords will need their drones. Perhaps the remote future of the University of Toronto is one in which "applications" still get explored in those labs on the east side of St George, while the west side is mothballed.
Hastily, respectfully,
hoping that science education is destined to be duly dissected at JMG's ADR and elsewhere
with mention of the academic divide between theoretical work and engineering,
Tom
http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com
7/14/16, 10:43 AM
Toomas (Tom) Karmo said...
Two further thoughts to my "====2====" posting (above, as UTC=20160714T165755Z). So think of this as not "2" but "2-prime":
(i) I have practiced (in my blog) what I here (on JMG's blog) preach. I touched briefly on the east-west divide in my "Is Science Doomeed" essay at http://toomaskarmo.blogspot.com ("Part C", posting of 2016-06-14: search for string "drones with cameras"). But I will have to blog about the divide over there again, perhaps this autumn.
(ii) I hope no engineers here at ADR will be very angry with me! Engineering is only as good as our overarching social arrangements. In a society in which corporations and the military take the social decisions, we cannot expect engineering to be a fully happy profession. A happy society - "creating a new society in the shell of the old", they say at Catholic Worker - would have its engineers. They would be working on things like carbon-neutral, biomass-burning, locomotives.
Hastily, respectfully,
Tom
7/14/16, 10:46 AM
Grim said...
Last night something happened to be that drove home your position that the latest technology is not better.
My GF got new cable boxes. There was nothing wrong with the existing equipment, but that corporate nightmare Comcast (Com-curse) wants to "update" the equipment every 2 years. I spent over an hour on the phone to some guy in China and 48 hours later they still haven't activated the new boxes. Remember, the old ones worked just fine. They weren't as pretty and were physically a bit a larger.
My poor GF had to listen to me quoting chapter and verse from this blog about "improvements" in technology.
Thanks for all your hard work.
7/14/16, 11:32 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
Shane -- I think you put WAY too much stock in there being actual differences between Clinton and Trump. Both benefit enormously from the status quo, neither has any reason at all to change it.
And you lecture me about not understanding the tides of history. Really? Have you been reading this blog very long? It's because of the long arc of history that I think random insurgencies at this point in it would be nothing but a waste of lives, resources, and energy. We are nowhere near the point yet (sorry JMG, but I really disagree with you on this one) that such a thing would catch fire and do anything but get people killed and STRENGTHEN central government's claim to power and more intrusive policies. Let the dang feds die under their own bloated weight, they're doing that fast enough already!
Son, I'm not pitching a fit, I'm trying to slap some sense into your head. As a fellow southerner you should know the difference.
7/14/16, 11:40 AM
avalterra said...
AV
7/14/16, 11:42 AM
Dennis D said...
For your homework assignments, I tried to read Henry James "portrait of a lady", then the De Sade link from someone in the comments. With both I found a bigger gulf from the class issues than the age differences. Portrait could have been about someone trying to fit in the Hamptons, and de Sade could have been about the ugly side of billionaires, just substitute a 737 and a private island for an ex-president and his friends, and a few other minor details. This is in regards to things like treatment of servants, as nobody that I know has a servant.
As for your election, I agree that the choice is either go with a certified monster, of gamble that an upstart might do what he says. If he toes the line of the puppet masters, you are no worse off than if you had selected an obvious marionette, but you at least have a chance at improvement.
My personal rant about engineers, as an electrician, is that too many assume that because it fits in a CAD program, it must work in the real world, which has esoteric concerns about whether there is room for your hand and wrench to fit in the required space, or will your hand bend that way.
7/14/16, 11:53 AM
A Post-Millennial said...
Dear Mr. Greer, I have sent an email to Stone Circle Press about offering a snail mail option for subscription, and also asking about ownership of the mailing list. If the company owns the list...companies do get sold sometimes, and I suppose the list is considered an asset."
Hi Nastarana, we saw your email; give us a day or two to respond, we need to talk over the feasibility of offering a snail mail subscription option. We are not a company, but rather a indy/DIY print shop, which is to say of group of people with a printer and some ambition. That means we/our assets will never be sold off; your data is secure. It also, however, means that we need to talk about who, if any of us, is comfortable having our home address listed publicly (and/or whether it's worth the cost of renting a PO Box).
Hope that helps!
"nrgmiserncaz
JMG - I'm another happy subscriber to the print edition. Was hoping you'd make a little coin from the effort but I can always add to the tip jar instead. Including the comments would be welcome too."
You should definitely drop a little something in JMG's tip jar. Without him, none of this would exist. As far as including comments goes, like we said above, that would make the zine extremely long and therefore prohibitively expensive to produce and ship, unless people are willing to pay a significant markup for an edition that includes comments.
7/14/16, 12:24 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
@Unknown:
I feel your pain, I'm dealing with something similar now too. My advice, take it one step at a time, look to the future, not the past, and understand that things aren't as good as you've been told, but better than they could be. Just find ways to make the world a little better (or at least, less bad), and that's all anyone can do.
7/14/16, 1:07 PM
Tidlösa said...
You´re statements about politics are spot on. This is one of the reasons why Plato was wrong when he attacked democracy with the argument that "just as a ship must have a competent captain, and only one, and you can´t have the crew elect him, a state needs a competent leader", etc. The leader of a state isn´t like a ship captain. (Of course, Plato - on the standard interpretation - was a utopian, so in his strictly ordered state, I suppose there could be "captains".) In a real state, there is always "class struggle" and/or attempts to mediate it.
As for scientists, I think both they and "real" intellectuals would love to have political influence, are resentful because they don´t have it, or (in some cases) wrongly imagine that they *do* have it. This often leads to conundrums of various kinds. Sometimes, the cluelessness of scientists is almost comic - regardless of what you think about Greenpeace or genetic engineering, it´s not savvy to attack them in a way that simply confirms the picture of arrogant "Nobel Prize winners" in an ivory tower looking down on the common man. The fact that politicians aren´t Platonic captains, doesn´t mean they should be clueless! Another classic was the attempt to rebrand atheists as "Brights"...
As for Dawkins, I think one of his problems is that he constantly repeats the same sound bites over and over again... They may have been interesting the first time, but the shtick is getting old after 10 or 15 years! He tried to rebrand himself as an anti-Muslim tweeter on Twitter, but it seems this too has grown old (perhaps surprisingly). Today, Dawkins is even attacked with impunity by the "SJWs", suggesting that he has lost his status as a culture icon. I kind of like the old rascal and his gung-ho documentaries, despite not being a hard-core skeptic myself, but his reductionism and purely negative criticism of religion/spirituality was, I think, destined to have a relatively short shelf life within the general culture.
One of my fears is that science and the scientific method (which are indeed achievements of the human mind) will be destroyed by the cluelessness of really existing scientists themselves...
I sometimes feel *they* could need an authoritarian captain to navigate the stormy seas of the long descent!
7/14/16, 1:32 PM
Dennis D said...
7/14/16, 2:41 PM
Eric S. said...
It seems the one phrase that is most crucial for the climate change movement to bring forward at this point… that hasn’t been brought up once and usually gets silenced as denial when someone utters it… that would actually go a long way towards providing the jobs and prosperity for the working classes that would be necessary to breach the divide is “damage control.” Most of the measures being discussed and implemented right now are preventative, and climate change is advanced enough at this point that we need to be looking at responsive measures… And the thing is, the act of building up coastal fortifications and levies in vulnerable coastal areas as a rear guard, relocating vulnerable economic, political and population centers, setting up seed banks and greenhouses in preparation for shifts in growing regions, and a host of other responsive measures would open up more construction and agricultural jobs than the global workforce could shake a stick at. The fact that not a single responsive measure has been brought forward, makes it look to climate deniers as though the people talking about climate change don’t really believe the words coming out of their mouths.
7/14/16, 2:59 PM
Eric S. said...
One of the weirdest logic moments I encountered during my creationist childhood happened sometime after I’d finally given up on trying to force-fit my observations of the world into the ideology, and started following the literature of an Old Earth Creationist organization called “Reasons to Believe. I finally went to attend a conference where the leaders of the organization were speaking (I was around 13 or 14 at time), and during the Q&A I asked them some questions: one was about the 4 million years worth of pre-human hominids in the fossil record, and whether they are transitional forms that pose a challenge to creationism. Their answer was that God created them to “prepare the Earth for the creation of Man,” My other question was, if everything on earth was created for the benefit of humankind, why were there so many species that went extinct before humans were created. Their answer to that one was that God had to keep the earth populated with a large amount of biomass for eons before he created humans, because he needed to ensure that humans were endowed with the biodeposits necessary to launch and sustain a global high technology civilization that could ensure that Christ’s followers could distribute the gospel throughout the world in a short time, rather than a long time. That conference turned me into a reluctant theistic evolutionist, and was the beginning of a long journey. So I got to work through the logic of engineer thinking… and out of it at a fairly young age.
One thing that does concern me about the crisis of legitimacy in science is just how complete it could be, and how irreversible. There are some aspects of our scientific knowledge that we may have only had one shot at gathering, especially in paleontology. In addition to depleting natural resources for economic growth such as fossil fuels, we’ve also depleted our reserves of actual fossils. Would a combination of peak fossil, and a revolt against the sciences potentially lead to a permanent loss of the records that allow us to see how whales, birds, and humans evolved, and what the deep history of the planet looks like? If our civilization rejected that, we might be the last civilization to have that chance, and the best records of the evolution of life might never have a chance to emerge again.
In some of your early posts on this project, you’d explored the possibility of nature religion as a new religious sensibility, and that such concepts as human kinship with other life, the smallness of humanity in the eye of deep time, and human impacts on the environment as playing a major role in the mythos and ethos of our successor civilizations. In your solstice trilogy, you even had a culture that treated the Origin of the Species like scripture. Has the new sensibility ship pretty much sailed as anything that’s ever going to appeal to any but a tiny few? A part of me had been thinking that there’d eventually come a point where we realized that ecological devastation, recourse overuse, pollution and climate change and an array of other factors had run their course, some form of environmental ethic on a collective scale would follow… now it looks much more likely that we’ll be blaming religious freedom, racial and gender equality, homosexuality, and any number of other things unrelated to the causes of our downfall… and ultimately placing the blame on the scientists who tried to warn us themselves… which ensures that there isn’t going to be much of a place for an ecological worldview in the world that comes out of this one…
“Let them perish, and all their works, their names, and even their memories. Let us destroy them all, and teach our children that the world is new, that they may know nothing of the things that went before. Let us make a great simplification, and then the world shall begin again.”
-Walter M. Miller Jr.
7/14/16, 2:59 PM
Cathy McGuire said...
You didn't mention propensities - the tendency of some people to think in some ways, that probably guides them to certain careers rather than others. Engineers are a good example - which comes first, the training or the propensity? As a writer, I know I've had "the writing bent" all my life, wondering what was going on in X house, or at X table in some restaurant - I was always looking for the stories and was amazed that others didn't care! So my training only reinforced what was there. So politicians are likely those whose propensity is both getting attention and problem solving in a social way (ie: they like negotiating - or at least until our country became so polarized). Scientists like problem solving, but only if the problem keeps still and doesn't talk back! ;-)
I do wonder these days if it's just too complicated to manage, even if we are aware of these different kinds of skills. I see the complexity factor topping almost all the others - society feels just about to fall apart from its own weight. :-\
7/14/16, 3:33 PM
Greg Reynolds @ Riverbend said...
Unless I am mistaken, poor people have lived in asia for a long time. How did they traditionally get their vitamin A ?
Greg
7/14/16, 3:34 PM
Dan said...
7/14/16, 3:41 PM
Tidlösa said...
7/14/16, 3:54 PM
Tidlösa said...
Any relation between your pokemon and my werewolf? ;-)
7/14/16, 3:56 PM
Brian Kaller said...
I’m amazed at how often people confuse these things. National Geographic magazine, for example, ran a cover story last year on “anti-science” beliefs, with a list of common examples on the cover -- “Climate change does not exist,” “The Moon landing was fake,” and “Vaccinations can lead to autism.” Fair enough; climate change is fairly well-established, and links between vaccinations and autism seem to have been disproven.
To my dismay, though, they also included the line, “Genetically Modified Food is evil” – a disingenuous addition, as “evil” is a moral judgement. Genetic experimenters can splice insect genes into a berry or grow a human ear on a mouse for amusement, and that's fact; only we can decide whether they should.
Similarly, I saw a recent magazine article that began with a list of things “you shouldn’t be allowed to believe anymore,” beginning with “that vaccines cause autism,” and “that gay people shouldn’t get married.” Whatever your opinions of gay marriage, I was astonished that people would confuse that value-based question with a scientific test result.
7/14/16, 4:03 PM
Justin said...
For instance, there is not one word in the IPCC reports about how, say, irrigating a huge part of the desert with fossil groundwater might affect the climate, or cities shifting historic rainfall patterns with their aerosol emissions. I've notice that the climate buzzword has become 'change', rather than warming, or as one frequent-flier-climatologist (is there a special Visa card for that yet?) puts it, 'global wierding' is more descriptive. I think JMG is right that the best way to predict the future is to look at the paleoclimate record, but even then, I am not 100% confident in the paleo record's utility. It's very hard to find climate information that isn't one of the following:
Stories-for-children about how CO2 is bad, and if we fund universities enough and vote Democrat, we'll get to keep on driving to wal-mart forever in our (solar) cars to buy (3d printed from biopolymer) garbage (recycling futures).
Stuff like the IPCC report - questionable science based on even more questionable assumptions, with the only sure conclusion being "fund us more and we'll tell you how screwed we think you are"
Idiotic climate denial, basically just stories-for-children about how CO2 is good/neutral, and if we defund universities and vote Republican we'll get to keep on driving to wal-mart forever in our synfuel-powered F-150s forever to buy injection molded crap from China.
Serious climate denial, which comes from a variety of places, and although many of their criticisms of Big Climate are factually correct, their arguments that everything will be OK are equally as based on self-interest as the IPCC's predictions.
Conspiracy theories about how George Soros is going to make you live in cramped Agenda 21 housing and eat fluoride-laced ultraprocessed soy instead. Actually I think that's just life in an Asian megacity.
I try not to pay too much attention. Shale is going to get weird, and although I suspect JMG's theory of "follow the paleoclimate data" is probably the best basis for serious futurology, I don't have total confidence in it.
7/14/16, 4:33 PM
latheChuck said...
Today, Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon in the United States are quickly rolling out such hotspots, accessible to any of their subscribers, by piggybacking this functionality on the wireless gateways installed in their customers’ homes. Juniper Research, based in England, estimates that by 2017 one in three home gateways around the world will allow community access by incorporating a second network identifier and allowing some of the Wi-Fi spectrum available to that gateway to be shared, typically without the awareness of the people in whose homes the gateways are installed.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/why-wifi-stinksand-how-to-fix-it
So, when you upgraded YOUR wireless Internet, you helped provide low-cost wireless telephony (via WiFi) to your neighborhood. (And you'd still have done it if they'd told you that you were doing it, right?)
7/14/16, 4:34 PM
Christopher Henningsen said...
Certainly an engineering approach is less than ideal for open ended problems, and it seems fair to say that technical education promotes political ignorance. But stupidity? That's quite a charge, especially considering the track record of the politically educated.
7/14/16, 4:37 PM
Shane W said...
@Bill, I guess we just have to agree to disagree about the speed of collapse. I agree with JMG, sorry. Part of the reason I do find JMG's take more compelling is because he presents his case so dispassionately and serenely, while it seems like you are very passionate and bent out of shape about yours. Maybe I'm misjudging your passion and hysterics, but that is certainly how it comes across. It doesn't really sway me, I still think we should roll the dice with Trump and prevent Hillary from taking office.
As far as the class of those carrying the banner, I'm really not sure that it matters. Farage was a banker and Boris Johnson went to Eton, but I'm not sure that that means that the Brexiteers reasons for voting Leave were any less compelling.
7/14/16, 5:11 PM
Rita said...
On Doctor's Investment Syndrome I am reminded of my federal grand jury service a couple of years ago. One of the cases our panel heard was an elaborate investment scam which was so mind bogglingly unlikely that I'm sure we all sat listening with an expression of "who would possibly fall for this" on our faces. The Assistant DA presenting the evidence actually felt the need to remind the jury, not exactly in these words, but close that "even stupid people deserve the protection of the law." Need I add that some of the investors in this scam were indeed doctors. The experience of serving was very informative about the whole system.
7/14/16, 6:07 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
I was rather curious as to whether you had the concept of citrus trees and kangaroos in the back of your mind when you wrote this essay! ;-)! Oh, it was all so very wrong and I can still not get my head around the correct words to be used to describe such arrogance. I did wonder how many times that monkey business had been used!
Cheers
Chris
7/14/16, 6:23 PM
rabtter said...
I'm not a Young Earth Creationist but once was. I still have friends and family that still are, who unfortunately are quite hostile to those that aren't, so I just don't mention it when it comes up. I'm interested in the logical circularities you refer too.
7/14/16, 6:26 PM
John Roth said...
You commented on Bill’s comment: “Wars are conceived of, started by, and beneficial to the upper classes. They are fought by and murderous of the lower classes.”
You’re right, but that’s the difference between a crisis war and a political war. Crisis wars occur at the end of the crisis phase of the 80-year historical cycle, which is what we’re experiencing now. They occur when the situation is so dire that a lot of people feel the best option is to pick up a gun, sword, spear, club, convenient rock or whatever and have at what they can be convinced is the source of their misery.
See Strauss and Howe Generations or Fourth Turning or John Xenakais Generational Dynamics or the draft of Generational Dynamics for Historians, especially the latter, for definitions.
@Keith Hammer
It’s rather interesting that, until quite recently, college-educated whites, aka “the professional class,” voted Republican by a significant margin. Anyone who says that they’re the bastion of the Democratic party is smoking something. The bastion of the Democratic party is blacks and other disadvantaged minorities. See any breakdown of who supports Ms. Clinton versus who supports Mr. Trump.
@Professor Diabolical
Could you please list some of them? I seem to have missed that memo.
@Dennis D
I’ve noticed the same thing, however, I’ve noticed something else. All the ways of addressing the problems caused by climate change are not things that are within the sphere of climate science, so addressing them would be talking outside of their area of competence.
The only thing that’s in their area of competence is to say: we’re putting too much carbon dioxide in the air, if we quit doing that, things will return to normal in some amount of time.
So you’re saying that they ought to be talking outside of their area of competence?
Discuss.
7/14/16, 7:14 PM
Bryant said...
7/14/16, 7:19 PM
Myriad said...
Why am I bothering, considering that the work is way outside my personal comfort zone, the Clean Power Plan looks like it will be tied up in court for years, carbon emissions from my state's power plants are already going down at a faster rate than the plan mandates, and it will likely all be moot by 2030 anyhow? Partly because my state, Pennsylvania, is a major exporter of electrical power to other states, so how its citizenry and government respond could be influential regionally and possibly nationwide. Pennsylvania has been part of the historical origin of U.S. coal, oil, and gas production, so it seems fitting. Partly because even token efforts to reduce power plant emissions have a good chance of resulting in useful gains in conservation, renewable energy, and grid resilience. And partly to influence my fellow activists by example. (Many of them are young urbanites, and already have small footprints, but others are fellow suburbanites who are often rather surprised to learn that it's actually possible to walk six miles each way to attend an event. Sure they can't yet imagine doing it themselves, but it lends weight when I tell them they're fooling themselves if they expect to reduce carbon emissions without reducing energy use.)
But I can't say those benefits add up rationally to being worth the effort. Intuitively, I feel it's the right thing to be doing right now, and I don't know exactly why.
Interestingly, a clear majority in all demographics in PA appears to be in favor of measures to reduce carbon emissions despite the expected costs in e.g. higher energy prices. The salaried liberals want to save the planet (without changing their lifestyle, of course) and think they can afford it. The already-struggling urban working and lower classes aren't expecting their kids to have class immunity from the eventual consequences, and are already using less energy themselves, so they see little downside in supporting reductions. (Their kids are also the ones getting asthma attacks from particulates from dirty power plants in their neighborhoods). The rural working class is more ambivalent, being directly threatened both by energy policies (higher fuel prices, loss of coal and gas income) and by climate change effects (on agriculture, for instance), and so is far from united either for or against climate measures. The main political opposition really does seem to be from moneyed interests influencing the legislature, rather than from some broad class or racial contingent that distrusts the science.
I look forward to reading, in two weeks, your thoughts about the un-discussed interests aspects of climate measures. Who would be expected to pay seems pretty clear to me, but the "who would be exempt?" aspect is one I hadn't considered. I assume the answer is more complex than "the wealthy, as usual."
7/14/16, 7:49 PM
Candace said...
I know I enjoy the comments section nearly as much as the post itself. So maybe you could split the difference. Charge a little more for the subscription. But also treat comments sort of like classified ads and charge per word That would also help keep comments pithy. And of course JMGs rules would still apply.
I'm guessing you will start out with this on a computer so both might be feasible a subscription to the basic version of a pricier subscription to an enhanced version. Anyway just thinking out loud since it's currently free;-)
7/14/16, 8:09 PM
Adrynian said...
"I see the main class struggle in Capitalism as not Workers vs Capitalists, but Workers vs Finance. And the tragedy is that Finance is winning under Neoliberalism. But of course it leads to a crisis. And we need to say directly what's happened and take that battle on... to abolish private debts, and to use the capacity of the state to do it," Steve Keen, (20m 05s).
Steve Keen: The Alternative to Neoliberalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXSmaPGmEVU
[Describing the ultimate end-point of the "bad equilibrium" in his model:]
"...And then the Employment Rate plunges because the increase in Debt is now more than counter-acting the fall in Wages Share. But the last people to know Capitalism is coming to an end are the Capitalists because for a while those two forces balance each other out... and everything's fine for them until the [private] Debt Ratio goes exponential and the Profit Level collapses. So the Capitalists are the last to know their system is coming to an end," (32m 19s).
Inequality, Debt and Credit Stagnation by Professor Steve Keen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY5rto-ivoA&list=PLeTlY33FDoJzvjsQoLBbCHiJFa2LmVJNH&index=6
His basic starting point is three definitions that he turns into partial differential, non-linear dynamical equations to model the economy. His conclusion is that because banks create money endogenously when they issue loans, rising private debt-to-GDP ratios and rising inequality are symptoms of an economic system headed towards a financial crash. His work was first published in 1995 and he started warning about the Global Financial Crisis in 2005. His theory explains why most of the world is stuck in economic stagnation: net-new loans and gov't deficits are the only two mechanisms for creating money - which creates growth in a monetary system - and both have stalled out. Most people are [sensibly] trying to deleverage, and government austerity means they can't do so without shrinking the economy.
I hope you take the time to peruse a couple of his seminars, which are posted on YouTube. The two I have linked to are excellent primers, as are:
Why Capitalism Needs a Modern Debt Jubilee to Survive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpfLiKRqhQw&index=5&list=PLeTlY33FDoJzvjsQoLBbCHiJFa2LmVJNH
Talk to Bristol University Rethinking Economics Society
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCKo9HxgDrk&index=12&list=PLeTlY33FDoJzvjsQoLBbCHiJFa2LmVJNH
7/14/16, 8:12 PM
Unknown said...
"I suspect Tyson, if challenged, would be willing to admit that we don't currently have enough evidence to make all the right decisions, but would insist that such a point is reachable - and the current situation looks much the same regardless of whether he's right, or right in principle..."
Ask anyone who's ever held any sort of leadership role about decision making and they will tell you that any effective decision must be made without all the facts. If all the facts are in, the decision is either too late to matter or the question didn't matter in the first place.
-Joel
7/14/16, 8:19 PM
Shane W said...
for simplification, even if you wanted the US, the neoliberal consensus, the current order to remain in place for, say 20-30 years, and I wanted an end of empire and to be living in Kentucky, C.S.A., say, tomorrow, neither of us has the power to move the trajectory of things one iota one way or the other. Also, if you're trying to "knock some sense" into me, what about the hundreds (thousands?) of people who think and feel just like I do that you can't possibly reach? It is what it is, you have one idea of the pace of collapse, I and JMG have another, and the course of events/unfolding of history will prove one of us right and the other wrong, and there's nothing any one person can do to change that.
7/14/16, 8:30 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
In the America I live in (rural, poor, white, southern) people live from check to check. many of these checks come from the federal government. They are not gonna jeapordize them. Even though the status quo has thoroughly reamed them out, they still are dependent on its continuation. Literally dependent -- through state-facilitated addictions to nicotine, alcohol, gambling, prescription drugs, you name it. As well as economicly and culturally dependent.
My whole life, the stuff has been just about to hit the fan. We have always been on the edge of collapse, revolution, armageddon. And yet every year, it doesn't happen. It's like fusion power or Jesus -- always just around the corner, never arrives. So, yeah, I am inherently sceptical of the latest flavor of the month version of "THIS time it really is gonna all go down!" 'Cause while everyone has been waiting for the shooting to start, the bombs to drop, the riots to break out, it actually HAS all been going down. Steadily and inexhorably. And everyone is too fixated on their hypothetical future dramatic-and-noisy end of the world as we have known it to notice that the world as we knew it has already ended, time and time again.
7/14/16, 8:35 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
7/14/16, 8:36 PM
siliconguy said...
This is an often overlooked point the change everything now crowd overlooks. Who decides which third of the population dies? Choose whatever fraction you like, the problem stays the same. It was a third in a bad book I read (Natures End?)
On the subject of authorities blowing their credibility, l submit as an example the dietitians who stuffed the low-fat high carbohydrate diet down our throats, and now seem shocked by the outbreak of diabetes and obesity,
7/14/16, 9:11 PM
Indian Blogger said...
I agree that hard sciences folks do not have the respect for soft sciences folks and to be honest, I too was one among the tribe. It is only very recently that I have developed more appreciation for the soft sciences especially history. Wikipedia has been a great source to quench my thirst of knowledge for history. Part of my interest was sparked due to your extremely interesting writings on western roman history and particularly your thoughts on its collapse.
I have some observations to make
engineers are not trained to simply solve problems. We do try to figure out how to avoid and reduce the problems. I work as a software engineer and that is why we have something called QA/Testing to try to avoid problems. Apart from QA/Testing, we frequently do something called as Root Cause Analysis to figure out why problem occurred and if possible how to avoid it.
You are looking at brexit rather simply as a case of elites vs non-elite classes. However in my opinion, that is rather simplistic. The exact vote percentage is 52 vs 48, this is rather more close. And this is a very divisive issue, there was campaign to have a revote and that campaign attracted 4 million votes. And you have in my opinion failed to look at it from the angle of old vs young people. There was a yougov poll which showed a majority of young Britishers cutting across all types of class, gender and race voted overwhelmingly for Bremain. The question then arises as to what old people want to establish with their brexit ? do they want to go back to the glorious past of british colonialism and british empire ?
And I think there is an amount of racism and xenophobia towards non-britishers involved here. The old britishers who are not adequately skilled to take on competition from the young folks from outside Britain are the ones who votes overwhelmingly for Brexit.
In this article, you made a point about why don't powerful western companies give away their technology for free to help third world farmers. I get your point about the hypocrisy, but I think trade and globalization does benefit poor people all things considered. I come from a poor country called India and I have personally benefited from the offshoring and outsourcing as I work in a global MNC. But having said this I do realize, though I am well paid by Indian standards, by US standards of professional class I am not well paid and by US CEO standards, my salary is probably 1/1000th or something. I realize the wage gap is significantly high across all developed countries, but it is especially worse in US compared to even other developed countries in EU and countries like Japan, South Korea etc.
Lastly, I dislike feudalism. I come from upper-caste and I know first hand the drawbacks of feudalism. Lower castes are not going to go back to feudalism, ever. They are not going to allow the system to go back to a state where upper caste lord over lower caste ever again. That phase is over at least in India.
7/14/16, 9:44 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Godfree, well, we'll see whether the Chinese actually do anything about climate change. Last I heard they were still building coal-fired power plants as though there's no tomorrow.
Deedl, interesting. Thank you.
Peter, that sounds exactly like what I've seen. More on this in two weeks!
Sven, thanks for the correction.
DiSc, I'd disagree in only one detail. In my experience, training as an economist is far more destructive to the ability to deal with the real world than training as an engineer. Engineers, as I noted in my post, are very, very good at solving problems. Economists aren't. A joke popular after the 2008-2009 market crash -- "What do you call an economist who makes a prediction? Wrong" -- sums things up nicely.
Flute, that is to say, a liberal education -- in other words, the kind of education that used to be considered appropriate for a free human being, as distinguished from a servile education. Our universities these days mostly offer up a servile education, focused on how to serve one's government or corporate masters.
Patricia, glad to be of service!
Cortes, many thanks for the link. I doubt the signatories will ever read it, though.
Mikep, yes, and that's also going to be a part of the discussion two weeks from now. (Next week, of course, is the next installment of Retrotopia.)
Spanish Fly, all hail Discordia! I really should do a post here discussing the five stages of the historical cycle -- the one useful thing, as far as I know, that ever came out of Hegel's blatherings.
Scotlyn, true enough, and to some extent that's a reflection of Hagbard's Law, the rule that communication is only possible between equals. It would be interesting to consider whether the loss of information is proportional to the difference in power between the two parties in the exchange.
Chloe, as long as you grant the difference between facts and values, I have no quibble at all.
YCS, my only argument is your suggestion that law and economics belong to the humanities. Quite the contrary -- these days, both belong to the inhumanities.
Lordberia3, I admit I was flabbergasted to hear May talking about the sufferings of the poor, given her penchant for turning disabled people out onto the streets! Trump is definitely tapping into the same shift in the zeitgeist -- one that the Democrats, like Labour, have missed completely.
Mark, it does indeed.
7/14/16, 10:11 PM
Unknown said...
I am an old time reader but I rarely comment.
After rereading some related older posts, I think this post is a refresh on a theme that sounds about right to me. That's why I am trying to apply the scientific method and prove myself wrong. For example, I don't think climate change movement ever had a chance. Yes, some activists approached it the wrong way, but there were plenty of people doing the right thing and they got ignored (or killed, like the activists researching Amazon deforestation). The explanation is very simple: the world is too big for us to stop the tragedy of the commons. It's true for air (CO2) for oceans (over-fishing) etc.
On a different note, I am shocked how many people continue to misunderstand your criticism of the science (or maybe I misunderstand you?). Just because humans are fallible and corruptible and this ruins science as a social endeavor, that does not reduce the power of the science as a tool for investigating the world (and even ourselves, Buddhists use something similar in meditation).
The reason I bring this up is all the comments I see from people that are YEC or CC deniers or moon landing hoaxers etc.
One quick reply to Nestorian: I am not trying to be snarky but of course creationist are better at logic (or rather sophistry), that's all they have. Remember that logic is just a tool, not a goal in itself. And one of the reason the anti-YEC people are mean is just simple exhaustion after rehashing the same arguments millions of times.
I listened recently to John Searle's chinese room analogy and I tend to agree with Chris - he does not touch on anything related to Turing test. He does point to the difference between understanding and parroting (like JMG says) but that has no bearing whatsoever on the question if the brain is just a UTM (universal Turing machine). I was actually disappointed at the level of discourse - seemed very sophomoric to me. I am surprised at the success of this meme...
7/14/16, 10:14 PM
Unknown said...
Toomas Karmo wrote, “The warlords will need their drones.” You bet. That was Archimedes’ day job.
Dennis D wrote, “My personal rant about engineers, as an electrician, is that too many assume that because it fits in a CAD program, it must work in the real world, which has esoteric concerns about whether there is room for your hand and wrench to fit in the required space, or will your hand bend that way.” My job sometimes involved installing mods (modifications) of existing equipment bolted into cabinets on the underside of light rail vehicles. I often envied the octopus.
Some of these mods simply could not be made workable by following the instructions. I knew those particular circuits had been drafted by armchair engineers who had neither tried to follow their own instructions nor gotten a tech to beta test the design. We had a few engineers who were former techs. Their mods were better.
A few remarks on rebellion and revolution. Things are getting dire in Venezuela. I heard on the radio that starving people are standing in food lines and dying where they stand, or being fatally attacked by others. It didn't sound to me as if any group there is organized enough to pull off a revolution.
From what I read about revolutions back in the late Sixties/early Seventies, when Marxist revolutionary talk was popular among some youth, revolutions are usually not started or led by the desperate poor. They are more likely to be fomented and supported by disappointed members of the bourgeoisie or salary class. I'm of an age and class that has little to gain from abrupt change and that colors my view. I expect more serious rebellions and breakdown of order, but I don't think the US is in a revolutionary period just now. I agree with JMG that a stunning and obvious military defeat followed by economic losses could turn that corner quickly.
7/14/16, 10:17 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Don, you're welcome and thank you! Now if Congress really would reverse "progress"...
Alan, that's certainly a possibility worth research. ;-)
Leon, true enough. One of the reasons why democratic politics makes sense is that, when there really is no good way to make a decision on the basis of facts, you might as well let people do what they think is right, because that way at least they'll be less grumpy.
Patricia, oh, I drop in on Brin's site now and then. I read a lot of his early SF -- not so much the recent stuff; like H.G. Wells, he's ended up spending more time grinding axes than telling a story -- and I still enjoy the spluttering tirade he wrote in response to my piece The Next Ten Billion Years.
Esn, that's a useful point. I can't off hand think of a scientist who's risen to political power in the US, but I can certainly think of a very capable engineer -- Herbert Hoover. The trajectory of this country during his tenure in the White House does not exactly lend confidence to the notion that engineers ought to run nations...
Erik, I didn't say that the juggernaut in question was having much success getting activists to change their own lifestyles! For reasons I'll discuss next week, that hasn't been up for discussion since the coming of the Reagan years.
Scotlyn, very possibly.
Twilight, that's a good point.
Patricia, not an unreasonable approach.
Venkataraman, fascinating -- I wasn't aware of that. Fermentation in general is of course a very good thing for many foodstuffs, for precisely that reason.
Tom, I'll look forward to your longer comment. Thanks for the reference to the Jacobs book -- I'll put it on the get-to list, as her analysis seems very sensible.
RPC, I'm not arguing. The condition of the wage class is still much worse than it had to be, because such a disproportionate share of the national wealth was diverted into the process of keeping the affluent as comfortable as possible.
Paulo, that last story nearly got tea on my keyboard. An engineer who thought that a properly engineered bridge can't collapse -- bright gods. That man is a disaster looking for a spot marked X.
7/14/16, 10:49 PM
Stuart Jeffery said...
7/14/16, 11:05 PM
Kfish said...
7/14/16, 11:32 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
I forgot to mention that tools are misused all of the time in our society. Your example of the scientific method reminds me of peoples displays of belief in renewable energy systems. I see so many people saying so many crazy things about renewable energy, and when I tell them that solar Photo Voltaic panels just don't produce much energy at all when it is cloudy as it was this week and then it snows heavily, I'm directly confronting their belief systems. They appear to me to think to themselves that: we've got this here tool - how good are we? - and we can use this tool to replace whatever current energy systems that we enjoy, in whatever fashion we believe and it better damn well work how and when we say it does - or else. And it just doesn't work that way.
Things became so grim this week that I had to use a generator for a few hours (the first time in three years, mind you) to put a bit of charge in the batteries or risk damaging them. Yes, and who would ever have thought that batteries don't store energy like fuel tanks do! More on the snow on next weeks blog. The snow was very nice though!
Tools are good, but you just can't use a particular tool in all situations, you have to have many tools at your disposal. Sometimes you just need different tools. And sometimes you just can't do a particular job and have to walk away from it.
Hope you are having a nice summer? Global weirding is smashing me from one extreme to another down here.
Cheers
Chris
Hi W.B. Jorgenson (and others),
I read your gracious reply, but have little internet time today and will reply to you tomorrow.
Cheers
Chris
7/14/16, 11:45 PM
averagejoe said...
7/15/16, 12:56 AM
Doug Manners said...
But, as a previous contributor wrote, the technology fails in less than optimum conditions. So what happens when it fails? The farmers who used it no longer have their seed corn, since they stopped saving it when they switched to the new system. That means they are forced to buy "better" seed from the biotech companies in order to survive. The fact that the technology is free and then fails is part of the strategy.
7/15/16, 1:22 AM
Scotlyn said...
Note, power imbalances between any two individuals create a structural hindrance to truth between them, but there IS a way out. Parents who are interested in cultivating truthful communications with their children know that the key is to relinquish the advantage inherent in the relationship's structure - let it be known that they are secure with you, that nothing will induce you to abandon them, or withhold the means of survival, ever. Likewise an employer who provides job security & protects whistleblowers is likelier to hear truth than one known for randomly firing people.
And here is where values come in. Would you rather cultivate obedience or honesty in people structurally, culturally or otherwise subordinate to you? If Raspberry Jam has anything to say on this, so mote it be when it is yourself in the subordinate place.
7/15/16, 1:32 AM
Unknown said...
As someone who had a fair bit to do with problem solving from an engineering perspective in a wide range of manufacturing environments, my observation is that the effectiveness of the solutions engineers developed was entirely determined by the values and interests of those who controlled the cheque books.
That aside, thanks for a very timely illumination of some knowledge I really needed to acquire.
eagle eye
7/15/16, 2:07 AM
Chloe said...
@JMG - The only thing facts and evidence are good for in relation to values is explaining why we hold the ones we do; and explanation is not justification.
7/15/16, 2:42 AM
Doc Tim said...
Using the Brexit example, there can be reasonable value and narrative truths on both the remain and leave side of the camp. If someone bases a leave narrative largely on an incorrect fact that there were 30 million migrants in London competing for jobs, or if someone bases a remain narrative on the incorrect fact that income increases from EU membership was exactly distributed among populations, both narratives would be invalid.
As an engineer and scientist myself, I give the scientist/engineer emphasis facts more benefit of the doubt, but I still agree with most of your arguments. I would argue that both the engineers/scientist and political scientist mindsets are needed though for healthy debate to both weed out factual errors from the discussion while maintaining the ability to compromise between conflicting valid sets of values and narratives. The problems arise when the engineers/scientist focus too much on errors in minutia facts and miss the forest for the trees or when political scientist get their facts so wrong that their narrative can't hold together.
7/15/16, 4:38 AM
. said...
It also inevitably neglects the agency of the lower classes. People, rich and poor, have been motivated to kill each other for all kinds of reasons, individually or in groups, for as long as our history goes. I agree that what you describe is a factor in many wars, certainly in modern industrial civilization, but war seems to me to have other, deeper roots, in ordinary human violence, that have never gone away.
7/15/16, 5:00 AM
Shane W said...
not sure where the comment went, but the shooting HAS started. Some black people are responding to extrajudicial execution of African-Americans by police by targeting police, a not unexpected response. We're already there...
7/15/16, 5:23 AM
Shane W said...
7/15/16, 5:26 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
Similarly, JMG has made it clear that the fact he argues there is a substantial likelhood Trump could be elected does not in any way mean he actually desires this outcome.
As for slapping sense... I'm talking to an individual here, we are comparing and contrasting our ideas. That is where change happens. Of course I cannot change 100,000,000 minds. The only one I can actually change is my own. But, I bet I got you to think about some things, even if you rejected them, right? THAT is what an individual can do.
For the record I am uncertain who has the greater potential to be a disaster, Clinton or Trump. I think it is likely either will be ineffective and bumbling. And I am unlikely to cast my vote for either. You might not have noticed, I rarely say a single word in praise of Clinton, either. I'm in Tennessee, we are going Trump unless he murders Hank Jr. live on Fox News. So I can vote for whomever the freak I want to and not have to think "strategicly."
7/15/16, 5:29 AM
Unknown said...
When you mentioned the GMO rice, I must admit I scoffed at the idea that it would be a bad idea. Vitamin A is usually a good thing, and I imagined it would be difficult to amass enough rice to actually blow past the point where someone might get Vitamin A poisoning from too much rice. I saw no downside to this innovation; why did the Archdruid have his panties in a twist about something so self-evidently good?
And then you mentioned corporations.
DING DING DING!!!
As an engineer, I often see the issues as black and white; nuance and subtlety are things reserved for negotiating a change order with the owner. The ability to see the underlying complications is something that I struggle with, which I suppose is why I am an engineer and not a politician.
So thank you for the reminder that most problems are complicated. It is a good lesson for me to keep in mind.
I love your essays, especially the Retrotopia. It's a fascinating engineering solution to the creeping complexity of technology.
7/15/16, 6:45 AM
Shane W said...
7/15/16, 6:53 AM
Shane W said...
the reason I question your judgment, and metaphorically move away from you, is b/c of your inability to "Keep Calm and Carry On" whenever this topic of accelerated collapse comes up. I have my ideas behind the reason why it seems to upset you so. I would probably find your opinions more credible and be more open to them if you weren't so darn agitated about them.
I'm in the same boat, I'm sure KY is fully on board the Trump train, but I'll be volunteering for his campaign, so, if previous elections are any indicator, it means I'll be working phone banks targeting voters in swing states, as well as caravanning to nearby swing states to pound the pavement.
7/15/16, 7:30 AM
Myriad said...
(A perfect divine Creator would of course not be prone to such errors or omissions, so even a deists' God who did not intervene in the world would still have anticipated everything that ever happens in it.)
That, I'm pretty sure, is the reason why the "mad scientists" of literature had to be mad! Madness was the only justification for the "contradiction" of how a scientist could be able to create something but unable to predict or control it.
With our current awareness of nonlinear dynamics, complex systems theory, and chaos mathematics, the false equivalence between reductive understandability and behavioral predictability is no longer tenable and is being abandoned. (This appears to even be affecting some of the aforementioned deist views in interesting ways.) But not everyone has gotten the word. Engineers and most scientists still work primarily within established regions of stability and predictability. In many cases they, like most people, are unaware of how unusual those regions are within the overall space of possibilities—even to the point of being unwilling to accept the well-evidenced conclusion that the extreme behavior of a certain engineered structure that departed the stable region due to certain extreme conditions was neither precisely predictable nor surprising in hindsight.
So we have a public convinced that because forecasters can't correctly predict the weather all the time, they are only pretending to understand anything about how weather works in the first place. Mad meteorologists! And biochemists, and neurologists, and seismologists, and ecologists, and epidemiologists… It's a horrendous communication problem.
7/15/16, 7:36 AM
Eric S. said...
I do think Dawkins is very good at summarizing other people's work and putting it in context. Both The Greatest Show on Earth, and The Ancestor's Tale are excellent overviews of evolution in action as represented through experimental data in the present day on the one hand, and evolution in action over the course of Earth's history on the other. When he's attempted to introduce something new to the literature, though, his efforts are definitely lacking. The Selfish Gene tells us much more about Dawkins than it does about evolution.
7/15/16, 7:37 AM
Nastarana said...
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.jp/2016/07/what-if-consensus-on-small-scale.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+google/RzFQ+(oftwominds)
I think would be of great interest to the Archdruid's readers.
While I welcome the advent of a society wherein virtue is rewarded and vice is discouraged, I am less interested in the question of Who gets to be important? than I am in preserving a structure of land ownership that would allow for small enterprise.
7/15/16, 7:50 AM
jsn said...
I like people, but that's just my values.
7/15/16, 7:56 AM
Duncan Mitchel said...
Oh, dear. I followed the controversy over the Chinese Room while it was going on, and I think you have it exactly backwards. I don't recall that Searle had much to say about Turing specifically; his rejoinder was primarily aimed at later AI propagandists. Searle was questioning Strong AI's assumptions about the nature of consciousness, and I don't think he made any assumptions about its nature himself. Your objection to Turing's assumptions seems to me quite in line with Searle's.
7/15/16, 8:40 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
Nothing at all new about this. We have been THERE for decades. Historical perspective...
7/15/16, 8:54 AM
Eric S. said...
I'm not sure which specific examples JMG is thinking of, but one of the more famous examples in the classical world of logic falling play to appeal to authority in a similar manner to modern science is the example of the Sophists, especially the sophists of the second sophistic movement that emerged in the final centuries of the Roman Empire. They were were professional rhetoricians and logicians, and were highly venerated among the elites, who would market their ideas, products and policies as being endorsed by this or that well-known sophist and therefore worthy of public respect and admiration, much like today's celebrity scientists (as in the cases of the appeal to authority examples referenced in this week's essay). The fact that regular people failed to be as impressed as the elites who staked their reputations on sophistic endorsement can be seen in the rather more pejorative legacy of the word "sophistry."
7/15/16, 9:02 AM
Nestorian said...
Another general comment I have to make relates to JMG's prior reading assignment of reading a book promoting ideas that the reader finds repugnant. For those of you who might want to undertake this suggestion with regard to Young Earth Creationism, I have two particular suggested readings:
1) "The Modern Creationist Trilogy, Volume 2: Science," by Henry Morris and John Morris (1996).
2) "Shattering the Myths of Darwinism," by Richard Milton (1997).
Both are available cheap on amazon and the like. Henry Morris is probably the single most prolific Christian creationist writer of the 20th century; he also happens to have been a professor of hydraulic engineering who authored a standard textbook in the field. Richard Milton is a British science journalist who is actually quite hostile to Christianity, but who is more than willing to engage in irreverent attacks against the scientific establishment on account of the gaping logical and evidential holes in many aspects of scientific evolutionary orthodoxy.
Later today or tomorrow, I hope to write another post that addresses some of the particular issues raised in replies to my original post.
7/15/16, 9:28 AM
wagelaborer said...
Dr. Stein then posted a statement which sounded as if you wrote it. Maybe she reads the Report.
I don’t know if we have an “official” stance, but I can tell you my personal stance at this point. According to the most recent review of vaccination policies across the globe, mandatory vaccination that doesn’t allow for medical exemptions is practically unheard of. In most countries, people trust their regulatory agencies and have very high rates of vaccination through voluntary programs. In the US, however, regulatory agencies are routinely packed with corporate lobbyists and CEOs. So the foxes are guarding the chicken coop as usual in the US. So who wouldn’t be skeptical? I think dropping vaccinations rates that can and must be fixed in order to get at the vaccination issue: the widespread distrust of the medical-indsutrial (sic) complex.
Vaccines in general have made a huge contribution to public health. Reducing or eliminating devastating diseases like small pox and polio. In Canada, where I happen to have some numbers, hundreds of annual death from measles and whooping cough were eliminated after vaccines were introduced. Still, vaccines should be treated like any medical procedure–each one needs to be tested and regulated by parties that do not have a financial interest in them. In an age when industry lobbyists and CEOs are routinely appointed to key regulatory positions through the notorious revolving door, its no wonder many Americans don’t trust the FDA to be an unbiased source of sound advice.
7/15/16, 9:31 AM
Jeff T said...
I have been a long term lurker for almost a year by now, and it's finally time for my first comment here! First off, a very large thank you for the work you do, and how you have helped me to break through some of my own disfuntional narratives. I've read almost every post since that first one, and it has been worthwile each time.
It's really intersting to hear you speak on brexit, migration, class-issues, The scientific establishment etc in the way you do. It's so depressingly rare these days to come across a narrative that's not just the same old 'neolib establishment' or the 'alt right anti-establishment' point of view.
A good friend of mine (ex-environmentalist), recently revealed to me, that he is now a full-blown (pretty far) right libertarian. He is a very honest & intelligent (and even spiritual) individual, so our recent conversations gave me much material for contemplation. A lot of his opinions came as quite a shock to me (making me want to yell nazi-moron schoolyard insults at him), but I held back as I could see that he clearly had a couple points.
I'd be very curious on your thoughts on a few of the issues we've been discussing.
First off, (you've touched on that a bit already) environmentalism & climate change. One thing the right is obviously pretty worked up about atm is Political correctness. Ie - because there is so much silencing of dissenting voices in the environmental movement it must all be joke, created by a joint-operation of corrupt scientist and a power-hungry government.
How do you view the level of corruption within the environmental sciences especially climate science? Or this more just right wing propaganda?
Second, Anarcho-Capitalism. It seems to become increasingly popular these days, especially amongst people who spent too much time on youtube. I wonder whether you've come across the influential poster-child of anarcho-capitalism, Stefan Molyneux? He has managed to built up a cult-like following (like seriously cult-like, involving cutting off your all your family ties etc...) esp among young male adults, by posting hour-long youtube videos about the evils of centralized government, and what not.
all in all it's a further perfect example of another utopian political philosophy, derived from a single ethical principle. (I guess this was more a comment than a question, but mabye you've got some thoughts to offer..)
best regards,
Jeff
7/15/16, 9:56 AM
H. Bustos Domeq said...
7/15/16, 10:44 AM
blue sun said...
What was noteworthy was Hillary’s response to the news. She released a video statement: "Donald Trump and Mike Pence: building a great, big, beautiful wall between America and progress."
It’s interesting. I recall once reading about a speech given by Alfred E. Smith, governor of New York in the early 1900s. I can’t remember the contents of the speech but I believe it was about child labor laws. He made an appeal to morality and what struck me was that he made reference to something in the Bible. I can’t recall exactly what. It was an appeal to the authority of a book which, although I personally would consider an authority on moral matters, I would never expect anyone on the street today to take seriously as an authoritative text in a public speech. How strange, I remember thinking, that such an argument—an appeal to religion—could work back then. Yet how powerful and effective. It left me wondering if such an appeal to religion could ever be employed today. If so, it certainly would be less effective in today’s unraveling culture.
I guess we have our answer. It’s just not an appeal to the religion that most people assume—or I myself had assumed at the time—is the most popular religion in America.
7/15/16, 11:15 AM
RPC said...
7/15/16, 11:18 AM
Matthias Gralle said...
@JMG: Can you give a good reference for the crisis caused by the discovery that logic can't solve everything? The histories of philosophy that I have read were not sociological enough to talk about this kind of thing.
7/15/16, 11:24 AM
Shane W said...
I'm sure JMG can speak for himself, but in all the comments and posts since the original popular Trump/Politics of Resentment post, his comments have been supportive of a Trump presidency and critical of those who paint it apocalyptically. Maybe I'm reading different posts and comments than you are...
7/15/16, 11:28 AM
blue sun said...
Time will tell, but Trump appears to be no fool when it comes to politics. Just a quick comparison of Pence to the likes of Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney, or Sarah Palin reveals that. However, Pence could turn out like Joe Biden, who at first seemed a respectable intelligent guy but has ended up essentially becoming the next Dan Quayle.
7/15/16, 11:47 AM
Ed-M said...
Interesting report and a lively discussion! I was an engineer for a while -- I was never properly mentored, just plugged and played. I think it didn't help my problem-solving abilities any, unfortunately. That, and a University education that was more "training by rote" than anything. Well enough negativity for now!
On to politics.
What you described in the way politics works -- or is supposed to work -- in a functioning democratic republic. Under our system, those who have the most power and wealth bear upon the politicians through their lobbyists so that what they need to get done, gets done. Which means, of course, that we don't have a system of politics, we have a system of ANTI-politics ... which explains Obamacare!
Shane W,
Here I'll have to agree with Bill. Donald Trump does NOT have the common man's interests at heart. Watch this YouTube video: "You've Been Trumped" and you'll see what he does to people from the wage class and even salary class when they get in the way.
@Whoever (can't remember whom) said the engineers and economists are using their power and influence to force their solutions onto us:
It's not the engineers and economists, but those who pay their salaries, directly or indirectly through the politicians: the financiers and the business people.
7/15/16, 12:09 PM
Shane W said...
"will" vs. "want", it makes no difference, we both have our opinions about the speed of collapse, and neither of them will have any effect whatsoever on the actual pace of collapse.
7/15/16, 12:36 PM
Nick ZZ said...
One day in class I asked a question of the professor: Coastal bluffs at Arch cape on the Oregon coast had been rapidly eroding away for decades. My uncle had built a cabin there back in the late 1950's. The area was forested and stable into the late 1970's but then after extensive logging, sections of the bluff began falling away during heavy rains.
Over two decades, our family saw the original 100 feet of yard on the seaside of the cabin get reduced to about 6 feet. Other cabins along the same bluff had fallen onto the beach 50 feet below.
A class lawsuit had been brought against the logging companies by residents and owners along the bluff who had seen their property eroded away. The hills above the bluff had been clear cut and the resulting landslides and mud earth movements had obviously triggered the erosion and destruction of the bluffs below. But the residents did not win their case.
Years later, when I asked the professor about this, he responded in a hostile and defensive way that was very uncharacteristic of him. I am sure the entire class felt the ire in his response. He began by saying that "the people who build down there were fools". The land along the bluff is geologic slate and so is inherently unstable and so on. The clear cutting did not cause the bluffs to erode, it was the geologic slate.
I was so shaken by this out of character, aggressive and illogical response that I did not know what to make of it. Not only did he call my uncle a fool in front of the entire class, but he made no mention of the lessons he already gave the same class having to do with how deforestation can cause landslides. How many thousands of years had those bluffs been there without experiencing rapid erosion before the 70's clear cuts? Later it occurred to me that this well known and highly regarded professor must have been hired by logging company attorneys to provide expert testimony in the class action suit. They paid him to lie. He was not about to contradict his previous testimony in a class when questioned about the same formation.
This was a sad lesson. If this very smart and prestigious head of a Univ. Geology dept. can be hired to give false scientific testimony, then how common it must be that public issues today are tainted by similarly purchased expert opinion, when we know that so many scientists and science grads are unemployed, underemployed or low paid when they are employed.
7/15/16, 12:47 PM
Unknown said...
@Shane W--The context for what you were told in class is that (sweeping generalization follows) religious Jews read the Bible for guidance about how God wants people to act and about what attitudes and habits people need to cultivate in order to live a life that is pleasing to the Creator. In order to wring as much meaning as possible out of the texts, many forms of interpretation have been used, including symbolic ones. This practice goes back two thousand years.
The doctrines of Biblical literalness and inerrancy are primarily tenets of Protestant fundamentalism. They arose out of two needs that the Protestant movement had: that Jesus's resurrection be regarded as a historical event that took place on a specific date, and that the Old and New Testaments by themselves are sufficient guides for a religious person. The Orthodox and Catholic branches of Christianity don't rely directly on the Bible as the sole authority, rather the Bible as applied and interpreted through the ages by the teachers and institutions of the Church. That's what Luther tore down.
Judaism does not depend on belief in the historicity of any one marvelous event. To the extent that Judaism is a revealed religion, the revelation was or is (opinions differ) cumulative. Rabbinic Judaism thinks that studying Biblical texts together with later commentaries in a group discussion under the guidance of a learned teacher is far better than just reading the Bible by itself. What a day might have been before the Sun existed is not a problem that greatly troubles Jewish readers of In The Beginning, because it's not the point of the story.
7/15/16, 12:53 PM
sara drew said...
On a Brexit note, and following your thesis JMG, the new British Conservative Prime Minister has set out a social agenda well to the left of the current supposed progressive British Labour Party, perhaps as you have suggested in previous posts, this is evidence that the 'right' are now wearing the progressive clothes. Labour is tearing itself apart in true inquisitorial style and in such a manner that suggests its historical moment is over. I wonder if that is the fate of the Democrats in a post Trump victory landscape?
I write with heartache for France and a real sense of urgent need to reach out to the Middle East diaspora where so many live with such pain all too frequently.
I welcome, as others have a forum that is decent and respectful enough for such a diversity of opinion, disagreement and debate. Long may it be a light when all other lights go out.
7/15/16, 1:08 PM
SCjelli said...
7/15/16, 2:12 PM
234567 said...
OT, but there is a really decent article about global petroleum and energy out today by Art Berman. It recaps what those of us in the oil industry have been seeing for the last 30 years, and combines the energy cost and debt picture in a coherent way. He even touches on solar fallacy. This is from a petroleum geologist and not just some investor chaser.
I know you aren't much for pushing readers to other sites, but this is a really decent recap of where we have been, why and how the jagged right-hand side of M. King Hubberts bell curve will be very unpredictable.
There is no relief or jumping up and down that Hubbert was right, not for any of us. We play the hand we are dealt, but the reality is that profit chasing drives things in very destructive ways - and that is what we all do.
It is going to be a very bumpy ride down this slope over the next decade.
7/15/16, 3:32 PM
barrigan said...
It seems to me that many speculative fiction novels published fairly recently have actually become more conservative in terms of technological development - e.g. published in 2010, they withhold until after 2050 a technology that a book published in, say, 1990 might unleash in 2015. If the ubiquitous flying car is mentioned, it's usually as a joke made by a time-traveler wondering why there aren't any. This might just be a function of the particular authors I read, but it's interesting to note.
7/15/16, 3:52 PM
Shane W said...
7/15/16, 4:36 PM
Jay Moses said...
there are young earth jews, secular jews who accept scientific explanations of the earth's origins and reject the torah's time scale and a wide variety of fence straddlers who, as you suggest, try to accept both science and torah by questioning the length of the genesis "day". in his famous work "guide to the perplexed", part ii, ch. 25, the great scholar maimonades appears to contradict himself on this point--although he has a typically brilliant rabbinical escape hatch for himself.
i suspect that the person teaching your class on judaism may not have been jewish.
7/15/16, 4:56 PM
patriciaormsby said...
In a better world I'd vote for Jill Stein.
7/15/16, 6:04 PM
Nastarana said...
7/15/16, 6:24 PM
Shane W said...
I had no more interest in debating Creationism vs. Evolution w/you than I do the speed of collapse/effect of Trump presidency w/Bill. Choose your battles carefully...
Man, I wholeheartedly recommend my book, The End of Faith, for JMG's assignment. It's turning out to be a real polemic for progress, reason, rationality, and it's chock full of unsubstantiated claims and shoddy scholarship. I don't know how many times I've laughed out loud. Every sentence seems like it needs deconstructing. And, just like JMG says, it's Christian theology w/the serial numbers filed off, complete with an altar call for reason, progress, and rationality along w/apocalyptic scaremongering if we don't "get right w/reason" and abandon religion.
7/15/16, 6:33 PM
Nastarana said...
Dear Bill Pulliam, my great great grandfather was said to have been homesteading in Oregon when the Civil War broke out. He gave up the homestead, such is the family story, and traveled back to Missouri to enlist in the Union army (or some sort of Missouri militia). I doubt someone would take such a step because of tariffs. Three squares a day perhaps might have been the motive.
7/15/16, 6:34 PM
Kevin Warner said...
In thinking this over, perhaps the underlying fault-line is that modern humans way of thinking is still stuck in old patterns and modes and is just not up to task anymore. We actually need to revamp the way that we think in everyday life. De Bono's Lateral Thinking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_thinking) was a recognition of this simple fact. The state of modern education thus becomes a reflection of how faulty our way of thinking has become.
If anyone doubts this, consider the following examples of where our way of thinking has failed us. Fact, that after two centuries of modern medicine, there is still no simple statement of what the optimum daily diet of an average human being should be. Seriously, this should have been nailed down a century ago. On a deeper level, we have had philosophy in a developed form for thousands of years but there is no agreement on how a good life should be led. From the outside, it seems that this field of learning was abandoned to religions in favour of more esoteric philosophical points long, long ago which is why for most people philosophy, rightly or not, is simply regraded as irrelevant for everyday life when it should be at the heart of everyday life.
7/15/16, 6:35 PM
Dan said...
7/15/16, 7:34 PM
Mark Rice said...
There are parts electrical engineering that make intensive use of mathmatical abstractions. These parts include control theory and communication theory. Not many people have the aptitude and training to be effective in these areas.
The abstractions have always been easy for me. Math courses were always easy. I had thought that mastery of one of these areas was the end all and be all.
But then I noticed that companies that were well endowed with engineers who were really good with these abstractions were not the most successful companies. The most successful companies had people who questioned the problem. "Why are we doing this?" "Is there a simple way to do this?" Every successful engineering organization has the people who ask these questions. The people who can ask these questions, communicate with others, influence others and bring order and calm to a situation are often the ones who get promoted.
That said -- for some design efforts you really need people who can operate at the intersection of messy physical reality and these abstractions.
7/15/16, 8:20 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Keith, it's entirely possible that Trump won't deliver anything but misery to wage class Americans, but that's what they're certainly going to get from a Clinton presidency, so I can understand their willingness to hope.
Allie, not so fast. These people are selected by those people who are chosen by these other people, and your vote has some influence on who one of the last category is? That doesn't make the first category elected. The core of democratic process is that the people get to select, by vote, the people who make the laws. The more layers of insulation you put between the people and the lawmakers, the less democracy you have.
Professor D., the acceptance of tectonic plate theory was a good deal more complex than that! I watched it happen, so can testify to this, and it's only in very recent years that there's been an attempt to insist that the scientific community didn't reject it at all. Your broader point, though, stands; Thomas Kuhn's discussion of the way that "normal science" does its level best to ignore anomalies is highly relevant here.
Over the Hill, the difficulty is of course that this word "science" means so many different things. It means skeptical inquiry. It means a set of beliefs not yet disproven. It means a constellation of influential institutions that claim the exclusive right to say what is and isn't truth, and constantly maneuver to expand its share of government and corporate largesse. It's in the intersections and deliberate confusions between these very different things that the trouble comes.
Nrgmiserncaz, exactly. This notion that the privileged owe nothing to the rest of society, even when the latter is what supports and makes possible their privilege, is one of the sure signs that tell you that a privileged class is about to end up dangling from lampposts.
Varun, by all means use it!
Spinozarina, many thanks for the data points.
Donalfagan, it's good to see that they recognize the huge issue around irreproducibility. That's a stake through the heart of science. If results are not systematically checked for reproducibility, then science isn't happening -- it's as simple as that.
Hereward, the Piscean age wasn't very Piscean, all things considered! By all astrological logic, the greatest and most brutal campaign of conquest in the history of the world -- the conquest of most of the planet by a handful of European nations -- should never have happened in an age ruled by the least warlike of the signs; nor should such forerunners as the Mongol conquests and the rise of the Ottoman Empire. That is, I'm far from sure current ideas about the implications of precession hold water when compared to the evidence from history.
Dermot, I'd call it more a transition from fact-centered to value-centered thinking, rather than from facts to values, but that's a quibble.
Onething, I wasn't praising peer review as such. I was praising the ostensible goal of the scientific process, which peer review sometimes furthers.
Dermot, so noted! I sometimes wonder if the sheer volume of gobbledygook churned out by Brussels is protective camouflage, meant to keep people from noticing what they're supposed to be voting about.
7/15/16, 8:55 PM
Allexis Weetman said...
You are right of course that games are designed to be played and solved and therefore are not a good model of the real world. However 99% of my real world problems were also designed by humans, and many of them can be solved by looking around for the solution in a similar way to in a game(maybe not 99%, call it 50%). A sub-set of problems exist which are not at all like a game. Thankfully I do not only play games and have the real world experience to deal with these problems as best I can.
You argue that when presented with a predicament with no simple solution I will be more confused than my non-computer playing counterpart. I could argue with the same logic that reading fiction books makes a person unable to see the real world for what it is, that instead they merely see fixed narratives and unalterable story-lines which is not the way the real world works. If you had never really lived in the real world and read nothing but fiction you might be socially inadequate and unable to cope with the randomness of the real world. Such people as exist who only read books or only play games will no doubt be confused and frightened by reality. You might counter this argument by saying that most people understand that a book is just a book. But I also understand that a game is just a game and not a basis for understanding reality.
A computer game can be more than just a simple book-style storyline with some target practice thrown in these days, featuring moral ambiguity, unsolvable puzzles, multiple choices and blah blah blah I could go on for pages, but you wouldn't know about that as you don't play, in fact I would guess you actively avoid knowledge of the subject. And in discussing this I am just trying to bring one of your very own cognitive biases to your attention. Not because I think it is important for you to face it but because it rankles me to be told that I will struggle to make real world decisions. It would no doubt rankle you if I said that pulp sci-fi and fantasy rots your brain(incidentally I love a good sci-fi book).
I can of course see your point, but would refine it to say that if one plays a lot of games growing up and never examines how the real world differs from them would be bad for ones understanding. But most young people will come against these differences on a regular basis in their school and work lives. And there my rant ends.
Oh and the article was great and very thought provoking as you can see.
7/16/16, 12:56 AM
Synthase said...
However, the inverse of that - political astuteness combined with willful pig ignorance of science is absolutely disgraceful. I know this is the conventional view, and archdruids dwell well outside the conventional, but I just can't denounce it strongly enough. Having any significant young earth creationist presence is a great dishonor on a community, particularly on its educators, and a sign that scientific education is almost nonexistent in the area. You don't have to be a scientist or a self-proclaimed skeptic to find it contemptible.
That crackpot literature you mentioned I had found infuriating rather than entertaining since childhood, as I took it as an attempt to mislead and insult my intelligence when I was looking to understand the world around me.
If I have just proven your point about political stupidity by example, then fine - but graargh.
7/16/16, 2:12 AM
Fred said...
7/16/16, 4:32 AM
Fred said...
7/16/16, 4:41 AM
ed boyle said...
7/16/16, 4:47 AM
Fred said...
7/16/16, 4:48 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
> however pretending that's not the case is what annoys me
Well soft targets make it possible to deflect attention away from issues that actually matter. In effect people are saying: It's not my fault, it is theirs (as they point into the distance at other groups). When people tell you that: "if only I tried harder then I'd have enough", well that also deflects attention away from themselves and reorientates that attention back onto yourself. It is a pretty dodgy claim.
The question I have for you is this: Culturally, can you say to other people: I have made a mistake (on some issue or matter)? Essentially, I believe the earlier claims are aiming to avoid the questions of responsibility and culpability. Those are not easy questions to answer.
Your actions are a good start. However, I say to you that we live in a society of consumers. So the question to you is what do you want to produce? I believe there is an angle in that for you. Thus JMG's insistence on brewing good beer.
Cheers
Chris
7/16/16, 4:55 AM
Owen said...
When dealing with engineers if you're being very specific about what you want, they will take your wishes, find the corners they think you'll never need and cut them. You have to tell them everything you think you might ever want to do with whatever they're giving you, or otherwise you'll get surprised and not in a good way.
And if it breaks, they will say, "But you never told us you wanted to use it in that manner. It performed exactly as you told us to." You can hear that voice in the response that Tesla gave when that guy died using their autopilot.
Kinda like the way I'd imagine you'd negotiate with a demon, although I don't know anything about such.
--
And I thought rabid fundies like that only existed in the Deep South. I too have heard those kinds of stories about the earth only being 6000 years old, but then when you're living in Mississippi or Alabama, you just assume it just goes with the territory and you don't think much of it. I mean, when you see a church on every other corner, anyway.
Ironic. I was the dork in that place and time, and I turned out to be a massive heretic by their standards. All the wild children I knew? They're all like hard core religious types now.
7/16/16, 5:33 AM
Shane W said...
thanks for that, that was exactly how Judaism was explained in class, and contrasted w/other faiths, as well. I just don't think it's appropriate to speak authoritatively about others' faith. But I do find it to be a refreshing approach compared w/fundamentalist literalism.
@Patricia,
thanks. It's exactly b/c Trump is such a polarizing figure that I volunteered for his campaign. There's a skill to phone banking and even door knocking, and that's when the issue/candidate is not as polarizing as Trump. The goal is to find, identify, and motivate supporters, not waste time arguing w/opponents. For the 10-15 mins. you spend in a counterproductive argument, you could have hung up, put on the "do not call" list, and moved on to the next call/door to identify a supporter. As a call center veteran, it takes a special kind of psychology/magic not to personally take on people's tirades, and I fully expect phone banking for Trump will yield some doozies. I'm expecting that a lot of his volunteers won't have experience, so training them will be important.
Secondly, America's very essence in one of isolation, insularity, and provincialism. It's who we are as a people. It's who we are geographically, with two huge oceans separating us from both the Eastern & Western Old World, and an even more geographically isolated northern neighbor. It's why people come here. We don't speak second languages, we don't measure in metric. We're a very bad superpower, we're very bad at diplomacy, we simply do not belong on the world stage. As a nation, we should only be slightly more open than North Korea. The biggest tragedy of all this is plopping a poor kid from rural Tennessee or inner city LA down in a Middle East that he knows nothing about and is totally baffled by to fight a guerrilla war. If Trump offers some small chance of returning the US to it's insular, provincial roots and backing away from neoliberal empire, he should be given the opportunity.
7/16/16, 7:45 AM
Shane W said...
7/16/16, 8:00 AM
over the hill and down the other side said...
7/16/16, 8:51 AM
zach bender said...
7/16/16, 9:07 AM
FLwolverine said...
It seems to me that there’s a good possibility that Trump will not serve his full term if elected; some people are speculating that he might even bail out before the inauguration (which creates some interesting procedural problems). The basic reason IMO would be that he is more interested in being called Mr. President and making money off of his improved “brand”, than he is in actually being President. And in that case we would be stuck with President Pence, who is very much an establishment Republican. That (being an establish Republican) is why Trump chose him and why delegates to the Republican convention are already expressing their happiness at the choice.
But possibly those who want to elect anyone-but-Hillary will be ok with electing a party that is adamantly pro-life and anti-choice, that opposes gay marriage and endorses so-called “bathroom bills” (which usually go further in discrimination than telling trans people which bathroom they can use), that seeks to suppress voters rights, that supports tax policies that benefit the top 1% and trade policies that favor globilization, that seeks to end EPA regulations, and that considers climate change a hoax. I mean, after all, if you put the Republicans in power, it’s not Hillary!
7/16/16, 9:18 AM
FLwolverine said...
However, I did hear an interesting comment about Trump and evangelicals on a discussion on NPR this morning (Weekend Edition, I think. I only caught part of the interview). It's seems surprising (said the interviewee) that evangelicals would support a three-times married man with a history of adultery and no good credentials as a Christian, but the thing is that Trump has promised to make Christian evangelicals important in public life again. Cruz (supposedly the evangelicals' favorite) only promised to make room in public life for evangelicals, and to keep them from being pushed aside and overruled by "secular" and non-Christian interests, but Trump promised to bring back the days when Christians were (or at least perceived themselves to be) dominant and central in this country. "We won't be saying 'happy holidays' any more; we'll be saying "Merry Christmas!".
My comment: I guess we can put that alongside his promise to coal miners in West Virginia to bring back coal, and his promise to farmers in California to bring back water for farming. If he keeps those promises as well as he kept his promises to investors, lenders, local officials, and tradesman at his Atlantic casinos, there are going to be a lot of disappointed people in this country. But, hey, as long as Trump can "make millions" off his "deals", why should he care what happens to anyone else?
7/16/16, 9:36 AM
Nestorian said...
To start with, I am extremely delighted that he has shaken up "politics as usual" the way he has, and that he threatens the destruction of the Republican Party to boot. However, I will not be voting for him (nor for Clinton either).
Here is the reason why: I have a very real concern that he may turn out to be THE antichrist figure prophesied in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures.
Those who would like to appraise the arguments in favor of this position (perhaps also in the spirit of researching ideas you find completely repugnant) can do so at the following website:
www.antipasministries.com
From my standpoint - as someone who accepts the proposition that there will eventually be a personal antichrist figure - the principal counterargument to the view that Trump might turn out to be just that individual is that he does not strike me as sufficiently sociopathic.
He is textbook narcissistic, to be sure, and also pretty seriously corrupt. However, he has also always struck me as profoundly emotionally needy, and there is something vulnerable and even endearing about that pathetic quality of his that seems to me to be incompatible with the icy indifference to the positive regard of others that true sociopathy seems to entail.
On the other hand, maybe he will harden into a true sociopath if elected, and thus set the stage for the fulfillment of the antichrist prophecies.
7/16/16, 9:47 AM
ed boyle said...
very relevant current article about quagmire of professional science, hattip barry ritholz.
7/16/16, 10:20 AM
Ramaraj said...
Thank you for the excellent post. After reading your post, I opened Jose Ortega y Gassett's "The Revolt of the Masses". In Chapter XII titles "The Barbarism of Specialisation", Ortega analyzes the evolution of the the modern clueless specialist, whom he calls "the learned ignoramus".
He says that the reason behind this is that the modern people of science are "narrow specialists", that is, they don't know much about anything outside their own field. But this will not make them hesitant to pass judgement on other aspects of life, because they are so self-confident from their success in a narrow field that they forget they really know or understand very little about the world.
"For, previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his specialty; but neither is he ignorant, because he is "a scientist", and "knows" very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say he is a learned ignoramus..."
I have seen this life several times: the post-doc professor who has forgotten how to teach basic concepts to undergrads; management suits from top business schools who are clueless about human behavior; several educated, affluent people who complain that their life is awful, while even the most cursory glance at people around them and history will indicate that their life is objectively better, etc.
Ortega suggests that this is a self-terminating feature built into our modern civilization, which will bring its end.
"the civilisation of the last century, abandoned to its own devices, has brought about this rebirth of primitivism and barbarism"
If he is correct, I am sure we will see even more clueless words and actions in the days ahead.
Ramaraj
7/16/16, 10:25 AM
Shane W said...
"she-who-should-not-be-named", don't you mean she-who-should-not-take-office? ;)
7/16/16, 10:25 AM
John Roth said...
I've always been a bit bemused by the way Western astrology has changed over the years since Hermes (probably) invented it in the 3rd millennium BCE, using pre-existing Mesopotamian, Egyptian and possibly Hindu astrological ideas as a basis. The notion that Pisces is peaceful is relatively recent: it's mutable water, which is something that anyone who has had to deal with a mid-teen is well acquainted with. It's also the night rulership of Jupiter, which is more the domain of back-room deals and underhanded politics. In one very oddball system I use, it's the domain of Pluto.
I had the good fortune to be in the audience while Rob Hand was expounding the effects of the Vernal Equinox through the constellation of Pisces, star by star and historical event by historical event. That was when I finally threw the "Great Ages" in the dumpster. When you can match them up, usually with an orb of less than two years, it's kind of convincing, and the airy hand-waving of the "Great Ages" isn't.
Clue: there are either two or three major events in Western Civilization to come in the next couple of hundred years before the Vernal Equinox leaves the constellation and enters the no-man's land before entering Aquarius.
7/16/16, 10:44 AM
thymia10 said...
7/16/16, 11:59 AM
indus56 said...
Another might be that climate change scientists themselves do not seem to fit well into the pattern of scientistic arrogance that you persuasively depict in reference to GMO researchers.
Rather, climate change researchers in their pronouncements seem as much to be disabled by the growing distrust of science generally and a systematic campaign of delegitimization greatly abetted, on the general public's part, by the disruptive implications for one's individual interests of accepting the challenge to the facts and values that climate change calls into question.
In a time of atomistic sociality (sic) and a massively swelling precariat composed of neoliberalism's "losers" the prospect of potentially abrupt, catastrophic, near-term climate disruption is all the more difficult to countenance.
7/16/16, 12:36 PM
dermot said...
This is precisely the battle currently being waged in the UK Labour Party. Blairites have imposed candidates upon the local constituencies that the constituency bases didn't want. Classic example is Angela Eagle, the atrocious challenger to leader Jeremy Corbyn. Socialist Labour members spent years doing backbreaking work to narrow a huge Tory safe seat to a 256 vote marginal. Once it seemed that the local lefty (Lol Duffy) was close to winning, Labour centrists like Frank Fields asked Labour members to vote Tory to keep him out. Better a tory than a socialist - you couldn't make it up. Duffy lost.
Eagle was then parachuted in in 1992 as an 'approved' candidate. Duffy is a better man than I am, and campaigned to help Eagle win the seat. To a socialist, anyone is better than a Tory I guess, even a cuckoo's egg.
Under Blair this process went into high gear, so that now there is practically no connection between many party members & locals and their MP. Indeed, when Eagles constituency branch voted against her challenge to Corbyn by 100%, she simply ignored them. And why shouldn't she?
Should JC survive the challenge and return as leader, it'll be interesting to see if he'll begin a formal process of re/de-selection, allowing control to return to party members.
The Blairites have nothing to lose but their careers.
7/16/16, 12:47 PM
Iuval Clejan said...
7/16/16, 12:48 PM
Gottfried Wilhelm Melvin Hicks-Leibniz said...
7/16/16, 1:51 PM
Bob Patterson said...
7/16/16, 2:11 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
Thank you for the questions. They are both very good questions for me to think about, and I think I have a simple answer to one: my goal is not to create, but to preserve. And by that, I mean I want to maintain some of the things we have that make life better: for example, the scientific method, religious tolerance, hygiene, etc. to the extent those are practical.
I'm planning on taking up a "hobby" of soap making, since I figure it's important to know how to make, and offers at least a start to the tasks ahead of us. I react poorly to antibiotics, and a variety of health issues run in my family, so hygiene is important to me.
For the other one, I have been wrong in a few ways, but I think the big one was participating in acts which made religious minorities feel unwelcome. I won't elaborate for the simple reason it is quite embarrassing looking back on it, but I can say I've made mistakes and been wrong, and helped make problems worse. I'm trying to find ways to make things better, but I have yet to figure out how to go about it.
Thank you for taking the time to respond, and please feel free to ask anything else you'd like to know.
7/16/16, 3:34 PM
Shane W said...
Grammar pet peeve:
Improper use of the word "bathroom". Geez, transgender people should have no problems using the "bathroom" b/c "bathrooms" only exist in private homes and hotel rooms. If it doesn't have a bathtub or a shower stall, it's not a "bathroom". Public facilities w/toilets and sinks are "restrooms", or "washrooms" north of the border. They are not "bathrooms". There's no such thing as a public "bathroom". A public facility that has bathing facilities is a "locker room". Geez...
7/16/16, 4:16 PM
Shane W said...
7/16/16, 4:17 PM
Jason B said...
7/16/16, 4:27 PM
Cortes said...
Would he and his correligionaries have done better than the ancient Israelites in forging an absolute total ban on pork consumption (and obviously keeping of pigs) given our porcine chums' potential for disastrous competition with us in exploitation of food sources in the semi arid Middle East?
A taboo was needed, as described beautifully in Watson's book:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/oct/23/featuresreviews.guardianreview2
7/16/16, 4:45 PM
Cherokee Organics said...
Sorry, but I'm a bit dodge about computer games. And you may be interested to know that I enjoyed computer games from a very young age (Space Invaders, Pacman, Donkey Kong, Defender, Elite etc. etc.). I no longer play computer games and I'll tell you why.
You see many years ago, a group of my friends became addicted to World of Warcraft. And that game ate all of their free time and basically took over their lives. I'd call that an addiction. I had to go and find a whole bunch of new friends as that addiction went on for years. They were unable to communicate outside of that virtual world.
It is not healthy and they were checking out on the real world.
You see, from my perspective computer games provide an ability for humans to take risks without having to face any consequences. And that is very unhealthy as it does not reflect the real world in which the people actually do live. That feedback loop which is unmatched in the real world is totally unreal and so the users become addicted.
There may be some good in computer games, but I fail to see where. Sorry, mate.
Cheers
Chris
7/16/16, 5:01 PM
Hammer said...
Well, I'll start by not getting a car (it only goes 3.5 mph and I'll use it little during college), delaying my computer upgrade for a year (it's fast enough for my games and the next gen will be better) and setting the air conditioning 2° higher (preparation for the future).
I'll take on electrical/electronic engineering as a hobby. Do you think that's safe for the next 20 years?
However I think the collapse will start sooner rather than later. Since 1960, a recession has happened about every 8 years. We're due for one within a year or so. I just think this recession will start the collapse, considering the debt piling up, low interest rates, and slow growth. This time the investors might realize the recession isn't temporary like the last one, and their growth expectations are all false.
Also I think we're at the peak services+food+industrial output, looking at the Limits to Growth graph. I know it doesn't make specific predictions, but it seems like the 8-year cycle is timed perfectly with the peak.
But you're right, I'm just in doomsday mode, maybe because modern culture can only think of either business-as-usual or doomsday. Doing the hard math and learning more will probably help me get out of this mindset.
7/16/16, 5:10 PM
Shane W said...
and yet, had you crossed over to the Canadian side and driven a comparable distance in Southern Ontario, you would have noticed a stark difference. It's really amazing just how much more we've fallen than our northern neighbor.
7/16/16, 6:10 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
I hope you don't mind me asking this, but why are you a young earth creationist? I'd like to know what convinces you, it may shed light on things (often, or so it seems to me, asking questions like this leads to insights on something completely unrelated).
Personally, I'm not, however, I generally find it worth hearing from people I disagree with. I too find that young earth creationism isn't treated fairly, and is often attacked, a state of affairs I disagree with. However, it makes it hard for me to find good sources on it.
Feel free to ignore me, but the offer to discuss with someone willing to listen and talk is out there now. :)
7/16/16, 6:25 PM
barrigan said...
I think the main influence of precession in tropical astrology is more to move the fixed stars about the zodiac rather than to move the zodiac about itself - i.e., Rigel's now at 17 Gemini rather than 18 Gemini or 0 Virgo or 24 Capricorn or whatever, with the aftereffects that and the various aspects things make with it result in. The ebb and flow of civilization as a whole (particularly Western civilization) may well be more in tune with the theorized "Planet Nine" which, if it has an orbit closer to the 20,000 years that is the maximum projected, would change signs roughly every 1600 years which would be in keeping with the Bronze Age/Roman Empire/likely timeframe for full modern collapse.
@Fred
I have noticed this too. Over the past couple weeks I have seen maybe a grand total of two Trump bumper stickers, maybe one Hillary sticker, virtually no signage, and a particularly stark reluctance to broach the topic, and I am wondering if this is because people on either side fear violent repercussions from proponents on the other side and/or repression if the side they don't support happens to win. Or, very possibly, they support neither side and intend to stay home or vote 3rd party in November.
7/16/16, 6:28 PM
Shane W said...
Somebody had mention the black community as an exception to peak working class wages in the 50s-60s. From my understanding, the black community is not an exception, b/c the black community was disproportionately affected by the deindustrialization of the urban rust belt starting in the 70s. There was only a tiny window between the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the onset of deindustrialization w/oil embargoes of the 70s. I don't have the data for black working class wages over time, if someone does have the data, it would be useful.
7/16/16, 7:18 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
Your boiling this down to just a slow/fast collapse model is also trivializing and off base. And JMG is very very clear that he believe in "slow collapse" within this very generalized framework, so why you count him as being on "your side" is also a bit of a mystery.
7/16/16, 8:30 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Martin, your definition of politics is good! As for "healthy lifestyle choices," though, please remember that we're talking about some of the poorest people on the planet -- Third World subsistence farmers. What they get to eat is rarely a matter of choice, you know.
Toomas (part one), I also worked as a research assistant for a time, when I was finishing my degree. The research team in which I was a lowly work-study student, doing bibliographic work, engaged in straightforward experimental fraud -- a series of experiments that were supposed to be double-blind were nothing of the kind, and the people whose job it was to assess the data knew exactly what they were supposed to find if they wanted to keep the grant money flowing in. Of course they found it. I've had a hard time with claims about the honesty of science ever since.
Patricia, if Sanders sold out to get something into the platform, he's a chump. Both party's platforms go straight into the recycle bin the moment the election is over.
Alvin, Taleb is almost always relevant!
Toomas (part 2), that's an interesting point. I haven't noticed, though, that theoretical scientists are any more adept at politics than applied scientists.
Grim, of course! The word "upgrade" always means "make it more complex" these days, and for reasons Joseph Tainter sketched out in detail, at this point along the curve of increasing complexity, that amounts to "make it worse."
Avalterra, the funny thing is that up here in the north central Appalachians, I have yet to see anybody doing the Pokemon Go thing.
Dennis, it would be interesting to research the correlation between the spread of CAD programs and the rate of catastrophic design failure...
Tidlösa, the funny thing there is that in the days of the Spanish Main, pirate ships inevitably elected their captains, and managed prodigious feats of seamanship under that elected leader. That is to say, Plato was dead wrong. So are the scientists -- and I suspect you're quite right that a lot of it is simply the craving for unearned power that pervades so much of contemporary life.
Dennis, good. Yes, and we'll be talking about this shortly.
Eric, dead on target regarding climate change. Have you noticed, too, that whenever something climate change activists have been warning about starts to happen in a big way, they stop talking about it, or even insist that it's no big deal? It's really quite eerie, in a way.
As for the change in religious sensibilities, no, I don't think that's over. We're still in the very early stages of that game. That's going to take another post, but have you noticed how many hardcore defenders of scientism are overtly or covertly contemptuous of living nature? They're the ones who are waxing rhapsodic about space travel and uploading their minds into robot bodies, after all, while it's more often people more detached from scientism who are expressing the ideas of the new religious sensibility. More on this later.
7/16/16, 11:06 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Greg, people in east Asia in the not too distant past weren't being pressured into growing monoculture for export, and having most of the profit siphoned off for the benefit of multinational corporations, so they could afford to put some of their land into vegetable crops that are high in vitamin A. Read any good cookbook that has country recipes from an East Asian society, and you'll find quite a lively assortment of vegetable crops alongside the rice.
Tidlösa, an interesting speculation. We'll see...
Brian, yes, I've seen the same thing. It's very easy to set up a straw man saying "GMOs are evil" and thrash it; it's far less comfortable to talk about why people distrust the big corporations and their pet scientists who are trying to push GMOs on the world.
Christopher, you've simply demonstrated that these days, people who are into politics suffer from another form of political stupidity, and I won't argue with that at all. The fact remains that scientists who try to intervene in the political arena routinely defeat themselves and undermine the causes they support, and that's worth talking about.
Shane, good. Sam Harris is a fine choice -- the combination of saliva-flecked fury and hamhanded misrepresentation and cherrypicking of facts is worth the $1.48 price of admission.
Rita, thank you for both anecdotes! I love the attorney's comment...
Cherokee, among many, many, many other things, yes.
Myriad, kudos for rolling up your sleeves and getting to work. If that's the thing you feel you should be doing right now, go ye henceforth and do it.
Adrynian, long time no see! Thanks for the heads up -- I'll put Keen on my get-to list. Does he have books you can recommend? I'd much rather get ideas that way, as compared to seminars.
Siliconguy, one way or another, those four guys on horseback will be making that decision.
Indian Blogger, of course some of the people who voted for Brexit were motivated by racism and xenophobia. My point is that trying to claim that this was the only motivation is dishonest, and attempts to erase the interests involved on both sides.
Unknown, no, you understand me perfectly. Science as a method of inquiry is one of the half dozen or so truly great creations of the human intellect. Science as a human institution, staffed and paid for by fallible human beings, is no better than the people who participate in it, and is subject to all the usual human troubles.
7/16/16, 11:29 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Kfish, I wonder how many of them are economists.
Cherokee, no argument there. PV panels seem to function as religious totems to a lot of people on the greenward end of the left. Believe in them, and ye shall be saved! Our weather is sultry, sweltering and damp -- pretty normal for the area, all things considered, but summer is my least favorite season here.
Averagejoe, the Blairite "New Labour" types are trying to defend a state of affairs in which only those policies that benefit the affluent can be brought up for discussion. Corbyn is kicking holes in that setup, so yes, they're terrified. The irony here is that if they throw him out, they guarantee the emergence of a new party that will render theirs as irrelevant as the Liberal Party became in the early 20th century.
Scotlyn, hmm. When each party regards the other as an object to be manipulated -- whether the manipulation is for advantage, on the part of the dominant party, or survival, on the part of the subordinate one -- how much actual communication takes place, and how much vanishes down a corridor of mirrors where each party is trying to second-guess the effect of a communicative utterance on the other?
Unknown Eagle Eye, so noted -- but why, then, the proliferation of crackpot literature from engineers, when the influence of check-writing bosses is rather less at issue?
Chloe, I think it's more complex than that. I've seen repeated collisions with unwanted facts cause people to rethink their values, for example.
Doc Tim, I certainly don't suggest that the scientific or engineering mindsets can be dispensed with! It's simply that the acquired political stupidity that seems to come from a modern scientific education has itself become a massive political fact in our time, and needs to be discussed if we're to make any sense of our predicament.
Shane, and it's also a year in which a lot of people have their backs to the wall. That breeds anger and hatred.
Unknown, you're welcome and thank you.
Myriad, I think there's more to the mad scientist motif than that. The madness of the mad scientist shows in his willingness to create things that can't be predicted, and his lack of interest in the consequences. "I shall make a giant robot with death-ray eyes!" "But, Professor Zardek, what will it do once you make it?" "Who cares -- it'll be so fun to watch!" Thus it's a moral madness, not an intellectual one.
7/17/16, 12:05 AM
ed boyle said...
My sons are both thinking on science careers in physics and biology. I am glad I found that atricle from vox. It shook up any ideals of a good future I anticipated. Basically I have to get something similarly negative in book form into their hands. They play nintendo games, limit one hour or so per session. It can get them all worked up to play mario too long. They have read lots of lit and history and we discuss politics a lot so real world is known to them athough oldest brought an interstellar rocket ship patent to patent office(sigh).
Great article above explains how facebook and co isolate us and lets us create own reality. We all live in a video game with no external contacts, real journalism is replaced through guaranteed high click sensationalism, so brexit, trump win on lies against official orthodoxy, which was decades long allowed official lie. Truth is a rare bird indeed.
7/17/16, 1:16 AM
Synthase said...
Also, you mention you see the scientific method as one of the half dozen truly great creations of the human intellect - what do you see as the others?
7/17/16, 1:48 AM
patriciaormsby said...
@A Post-Milennial, I share Nastarena's problem of Paypal not liking me. Since I do not remember in what form I told it my mother's maiden name, I cannot use it. Could I send you a good-old-fashioned check?
@Everybody, finally back on topic, the University of Colorado School of Engineering recognized how poorly educated the average engineering nerd was in the humanities, at least in the late 1970s when I went there. So they required us to take a certain number of humanities classes, and put forward some recommendations for the confused. Thus in my freshperson year I took a literature for dummies sort of class with a bunch of other engineering students, and they had us all sit around a big table facing each other. I still recall the twelve other silently miserable or annoyed faces I saw twice a week. Not a one us us had a clue what the right answers were that the teacher (poor guy) was attempting to elicit from us.
That flopped, but later on there was as philosophy for engineers class that I was persuaded somehow or perhaps required to join, pass/fail so we didn't have to worry about getting the wrong answers, and the teacher was brilliant. That class is one of the few things I really remember from my schooling (along with the teachers of my Japanese and anthropology classes--they were great). The most important lessons that he got across to us were "progress" might not be "upward" as such, which could lead to a dead end (like a minor peak on a major mountain) if we did not take account of the whole terrain; and that once you worked through your figures and solved a problem, you needed to step back and determine whether or not the solution you had was realistic. I knew from experience that it was too easy for me to get off by an order or so with minor errors, but he also gave us an example of an ice cream cone. You can stand it on its pointy end, and theoretically there is a position of perfect balance, but even in an ideal situation of no wind, given an infinitesimally small point, the probability of it staying standing is also infinitesimally small.
The class got us to think about reality, but I also recall a more mature lady student in my senior year advising me not to let schooling get in the way of my education. That made me think, too, but it wasn't until I graduated that I finally had time to begin observing people and learning things of real value.
7/17/16, 2:26 AM
ed boyle said...
We, like our 30 types of domesticated animals, have lost 10 -15% of brain mass, got flatter faces, smaller teeth, become more docile, socially controlled. Our frontal lobe, social control area, grows constantly. Ancestors were more violent but better at thinking independently, wolf as opposed to dog. We, like dogs, read faces well and behave correspondingly. Violent tendencies nowadays are deselected from gene pool due to social pressures, eliminating creativity as well. So we are smarter socially but dumber generally than cave men. Meditterranean islands like crete inhabited by boat not 6000 years ago as thought but 130,000 years ago. For the greater peak oil discussion modern man is therefore less capable of dealing with a very chaotic future than cro magnon.
7/17/16, 3:09 AM
latheChuck said...
1. Engineers are accustomed to performing projects. Writing a book is a project. If your lifestyle is one of running the business for the boss for your 8 hours a day, and then enjoying leisure, your crackpot theories may be more likely expressed in a conversation over a beer or two, but not a book.
2. Engineers tend to have more income than average. Self-publishing requires discretionary cash. A crackpot without the cash to self-publish would have to get his manuscript past a publisher.
3. Engineers may be thought to have more credibility than the average crackpot, so a publisher has something to put in the bio-blurb on the book jacket. An engineering degree may not be the best credential to cite, but a better credential may defeat the development of a crackpot theory in the first place.
4. Engineers may be more susceptible to finding The Flaw in the conventional wisdom, because preventing engineering failure often depends on identifying crucial details in designs or materials. I'm thinking of a subtle geological feature that could put a sinkhole under a highway, a missing minor component in an alloy, or a minor contaminant in a chemical feedstock. Details matter. But being unable to resolve the flaw can lead one down the rabbit hole into wonderland.
5. Engineers, having passed through a relatively rigorous program of education, tend not to be bothered by the fact that most other people don't see things the way that they do. Those other people simply need to be better educated, which provides motivation for writing (crackpot) books.
In summary, the existence of a crackpot book requires not just a theory, but also a belief that others will appreciate the theory if they hear of it, the ability to put the theory into manuscript form, and the ability to get a manuscript published.
Why, yes. I am an engineer. How could you tell?
7/17/16, 3:57 AM
John Roth said...
The use of fixed stars in astrology is interesting. The original use in Western astrology has nothing to do with zodiacal location: it has to do with planets making aspects to specific stars by paran. That is, if a planet rises, sets, culminates or crosses the IC at the same time as a specific star (1 degree or 4 minutes of time orb), that aspect is activated. Notice that this varies by latitude! Current practice has nothing to do with the way it was done originally; this just might have something to do with why the subject has been marginalized. The limited testing I’ve done shows that the original method works quite well, and it lends itself to a strictly observational astrology that has no need of calculations.
Re: voting
I’ve had to tell two people so far that I’m voting for Cthulhu. They asked. If I bought anything over the internet, I’d probably have a “Cthulhu 2016” bumper sticker.
7/17/16, 5:24 AM
sgage said...
"When each party regards the other as an object to be manipulated -- whether the manipulation is for advantage, on the part of the dominant party, or survival, on the part of the subordinate one -- how much actual communication takes place, and how much vanishes down a corridor of mirrors where each party is trying to second-guess the effect of a communicative utterance on the other?"
Corollary to this, perhaps, is a quote from George Bernard Shaw:
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
7/17/16, 5:28 AM
Scotlyn said...
"When each party regards the other as an object to be manipulated -- whether the manipulation is for advantage, on the part of the dominant party, or survival, on the part of the subordinate one -- how much actual communication takes place, and how much vanishes down a corridor of mirrors where each party is trying to second-guess the effect of a communicative utterance on the other?"
Precisely. If by "communication" you mean, truth, information, understanding, none at all. (And of course, here we are touching on the fact that power corrupts, and it corrupts both those who have it and those who lack it).
(And as a favourite Pratchett character was heard to say, "all sin starts with treating people as things.")
But that is not to say that each won't continually broadcast messages to the other that are more or less successful at concealing intent/desire/need behind soothing noise. Perhaps, for the sake of clarity, one might then call these dyscommunications.
The point I am trying to make in these comments, though, is that there exists an asymmetry in each party's ability to discern the other's true intent/desire/need through the fog of dyscommunication. The weaker party is much more likely to have devoted sufficient effort to study and understand the stronger party's motives, desires, needs, and even to develop empathy with them, so successful are we at emulating what we contemplate.
Conversely, that the more powerful party either does no such study, sees no need for such study, or having attempted it, does not succeed in discerning what the weaker party conceals, to such and extent that the eruption of truth after much repression and apparent ongoing submission, appears sudden, uncharacteristic, unforeseeable, explosive.
This "eruption of repressed truth" is what we are currently witnessing at present.
Personally, it is this corrupting influence of power that sets my heart against inequality, and I've long held to this mantra as a guide to my own dealings with people (and other living things): "no deference, no contempt".
7/17/16, 6:07 AM
Scotlyn said...
I confess I find Margulis most convincing, but have no idea if that is based on my personal biases or her inherent persuasiveness.
http://www.voicesfromoxford.org/news/margulisdawkins-debate/158
7/17/16, 6:13 AM
Scotlyn said...
As to creationism, I was born into an evangelical family, my parents are missionaries in Central America, but I was raised in that moment (60's, early 70's) before abortion became a signature evangelical issue (like some scientific theory fashions, this theological change of fashion has also been written out of modern evangelical sensibility), and between two generational pulses of emphasis on young earth creationism. In my youth the age of the earth did not seem to worry any of the pastors or teachers who taught me the truths of our faith, including my parents.
Later on, after I left my faith, my father and I argued about creation/evolution (though he was not passionately "young earth" per se) and later again, I came to the conclusion that in those debates we had both fallen prey the same foundational assumption. That for one to be true it was necessary for the other to be false.
I no longer think this way. I see both evolution (in all of its diverse tellings) and creation (in all of its even more diverse tellings) as narratives to weave human meaning out of the strands we can disentangle from the chaotic mess that is data in its raw state.
There is nothing in the evolutionary narrative that entails that creation cannot be true. And there is nothing in most creation narratives that entail that evolution cannot be true (although unless one adheres to an extreme form of relativity, probably a story aeons long will not reconcile with one only a few centuries long).
And the rabbit hole that these debates become is because simply finding holes in the other narrative is reckoned by ALL parties to be sufficient to claim "success" in upholding one's own.
Nestorian, I'm glad you've dared to name your faith here in a blog so expertly moderated that you could do so with confidence.
As for myself, I would say my personal disagreement with the YEC creation narrative is that the meaning woven out of it is too small - I cannot conceive of so many billions of galaxies, so many billions of micro-critters, each with unplumbed complexities, purposes, interior lives of their own, being brought upon the stage simply as props to a short little story about us humans and a small little God with no interest in the rest of the "props".
I can grasp that we humans obviously *think* we must be the whole point of creation (or of evolution), but I can't see the God that Haldane famously quipped was so "inordinately fond of beetles" agrees with us.
But in any case, the meaning you weave from the story you tell is your own, and no one should think it necessary to demolish it in order to uphold theirs. In my view, none of us have the "god's eye view" or the "omni-science" which science tries to have after dispensing with God. But we each can weave a cloak of meaning that suits us, that cements our place in the world and guides our relationships with who we will encounter there.
7/17/16, 6:42 AM
Patricia Mathews said...
I have Jupiter in Pisces and Sandy the Astrologer never mentioned that aspect to me! Please tell me more about this night rulership so I can check it against my own chart. Though with both Mars, Venus, and Midheaven in Scorpio, I hardly need the Tammany Hall Jupiter as well. Offline, if you or The AD think this topic is OT:
[email protected]
Pat
7/17/16, 6:43 AM
Shane W said...
I fully plan on being on the "down low" with my political activities this year, just to keep the peace. No bumper stickers or yard signs for me, thank you very much. I fully plan on using that good old fashioned Southern value of discretion (deception?) and smiling and nodding and choosing my words carefully around people, while I steal off quietly to volunteer for the Trump campaign...
7/17/16, 7:16 AM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
I sometimes think Canada is far less progressed towards collapse than most of the rest of the world. I don't know why that would be, but Canadian politics doesn't seem to have Trump like figures, and we even went so far as to rally around the establishment in the last election. Compared to the US and UK, based on my experience at least, our infrastructure is better maintained; we still have a pretty good healthcare system compared to other parts of the world; we seem to have a better social net than other countries (still not good, but better)
Maybe this is just me falling for our media claiming Canada is doing better than elsewhere, and I hope so. Once the empire comes unraveled it will be worse for us than elsewhere, we have much further to fall.
On a related note, I think I can now explain where the weird Canadian collective "we are not American! We are the good guys" identity comes from: we realize we benefit mightily from the empire we are such a willing part of, and so we reject it without actually rejecting it. Thus why we are so determined to appear independent, and the common anti-Americanism in our identity, speech, but not actions.
If I'm right, Canada is going to have a very hard time adjusting when the empire falls.
7/17/16, 7:56 AM
Mon Seul Desir said...
Greg, people in east Asia in the not too distant past weren't being pressured into growing monoculture for export, and having most of the profit siphoned off for the benefit of multinational corporations, so they could afford to put some of their land into vegetable crops that are high in vitamin A. Read any good cookbook that has country recipes from an East Asian society, and you'll find quite a lively assortment of vegetable crops alongside the rice.
-------------------------------
Actually this is incorect. From the histories I read, the spread of vitamin deficiency diseases in East Asia was linked to the spread of mechanized rice milling because of demand for "white" rice which was what the upper classes ate. In rice most of the vitamin content is in the outer layer of the grain which is stripped away by the milling process. This affected disproportionally the poorer classes whose diet was more rice dominated.
This is one of the many instances in which the quality of the diet was degraded by industrial food processing.
7/17/16, 8:19 AM
Grebulocities said...
I'd also recommend Varoufakis if you haven't read him yet. His most recent book, And the Weak Suffer What They Must, details the history and absurdities of the Euro, and how that fits in with post-war economic history. There are also a lot of revealing anecdotes from his five months as Greek finance minister.
7/17/16, 10:17 AM
Shane W said...
when you went from saying that Sanders was just another sellout Democrat to saying that his movement was legit, I questioned you and you said that you thought he represented a real populist change. Now that he's sold out, I guess I'm going to ask the question again, were you wrong about Sanders? Just curious...
7/17/16, 11:24 AM
heather said...
BTW, "bathroom", "restroom", and "washroom" all strike me as equally euphemistic. "Toilet", while admirably direct and also kinda-Euro-sophisticated-sounding, is probably a bit TOO unvarnished for most U.S. audiences. Besides, "bathroom bill" has that alliteration thing going for it. I personally suggest that we all mind our own business about where other people do THEIR business, and then we don't have to talk about it at all.
--Heather in CA
7/17/16, 12:17 PM
Tom Doak said...
7/17/16, 12:40 PM
Dan Bashaw said...
7/17/16, 1:02 PM
Martin B said...
*exits left, grumbling*
7/17/16, 1:27 PM
Ed-M said...
"Here is the reason why: I have a very real concern that he may turn out to be THE antichrist figure prophesied in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures."
Well I'm somewhat still familiar with the Jewish and Christian writings. In the Book of Revelations, the number of the man of the Beast was 666, sometimes 616. It turns out that if you translate the Greek "NERON CAESAR" into Aramaic and apply Hebrew Gematria to it, you come up with 666. THe Latin "NERO CAESAR", 616. Now all things should have been brought to an end back in the turn of the Second Century ce, because there were rumours that Domitian was Nero Redivivus, and Revelation was written about that time.
Now, take all the US Presidents since Reagan and put them side-by-side with the first seven Caesars (Reagan as Julius Caesar, George H. W. Bush as Augustus, Clinton as Tiberius, Dubya as Caligula, and Obama as Claudius), the next one will be Nero! So if we get Trump, he is comparable to The Antichrist; Hillary, the Whore of Babylon.
Hey if the shoe fits them, they should wear it. And I'm not even a believer! :^)
7/17/16, 2:08 PM
Shane W said...
7/17/16, 3:03 PM
Yellow Submarine said...
Meanwhile, we just had yet another horrific mass casualty terrorist attack by Islamic extremists in France and Turkey appears to be descending into chaos in the wake of a botched military coup.
This year seems to have a very strong 1860 end-of-the-James-Buchanan-administration vibe to it. Yikes!
7/17/16, 3:27 PM
Shane W said...
if I could tack on to Scotlyn, I think the religious gulf between us is so vast it cannot be bridged. My spirituality is such that humans are but a tiny, insignificant spec in a vast universe of unimaginable depth and time and possibilities. Evolution is just self evident to me. Your beliefs are very different, I take it, and I wouldn't even know how to bridge that gulf.
W B Jorgenson,
I tend to agree with JMG that when the compost hits the wind turbine in a major way, Canada will cozy up to the next up and coming power. It has that history. There's the history of the Loyalists and British North America. When it was evident that the UK was cozying up to the US and sold Canada out on the Alaska border, Canada outdid the UK on the cozying up to the US front. Now it seems to be doing the same thing with China and/or India. My hope and prayer is that Canada cozies up to the world's largest democracy, India, rather than China, when the compost hits the wind turbine south of the border, but that's just me.
7/17/16, 6:30 PM
Nestorian said...
To answer your question briefly, I am a YEC because I have a vested interest in the historicity of the Gospel accounts of Jesus of Nazareth's death and resurrection. After I became sufficiently familiar with the Judeo-Christian scriptures about 10 years ago, it finally became clear to me that the historicity of the Gospels stands or falls with the historicity of the early parts of Genesis.
This is, of course, a circular mode of reasoning, in that I am presupposing a faith-based conclusion and then creating an intellectually plausible conceptual edifice that encompasses biblical studies, ancient history, empirical science, etc., to sufficiently justify that conclusion to myself. This deviation from the strict requirements of logical thought cannot be avoided, as all reasoning involving faith-based pre-conceived beliefs as conclusions to be justified is circular in this way.
The thing is that this circularity applies to the evolutionary position also. The atheist philosopher of science Karl Popper famously (or infamously, perhaps) demonstrated that evolution is a non-falsifiable proposition, and thus falls outside the realm of being provable by the scientific method. Just like with my belief in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the belief in evolution, once presupposed, can be bent and adjusted to any conceivable set of empirical scientific data. As such, no set of empirical data could ever possibly disprove evolution to someone who remains doggedly committed to believing in it.
A good example of this metaphysical, non-scientific, faith-based sort of stretching of the data to fit the evolutionary presupposition is the use of punctuated equilibrium in biology, and of neo-catastrophism in geology, to accommodate the burgeoning of scientific data to the increasing untenability of neo-Darwinian and Lyellian gradualism, respectively in the 1970s and 80s.
YEC polemicists quite justifiably hammer away at the way in which this shift from gradualism to saltationism revealed that the evolutionary position is ultimately just as faith-based, and just as logically circular, as the creationist attempt to maintain the resurrection by accommodating scientific data to a literal interpretation of the Scriptures.
At the end of the day, if both positions are logically circular, there is no need for me to feel intellectually inferior to evolutionists.
7/17/16, 6:39 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Nastarana, thanks for the link.
Jsn, once you get into words like "better" you're outside the purview of science, which deals with facts, and into the realm of values, about which science properly speaking has nothing to say.
Nestorian, thank you -- I'm glad that you find my online living room a comfortable place. I abhor the modern intolerance for intellectual disagreement, and the habit of bullying that so often accompanies it. I'm pleased to note, though, that I didn't have to delete anybody who tried to troll you; this blog attracts a very high quality of readers, which delights me!
Wagelaborer, vaccination is one of the many subjects where I irritate all sides. On the one hand, I'm quite aware that vaccination has saved countless lives, and some of the claims made about its noxiousness don't hold water. On the other hand, some of the claims about specific vaccines do seem to be well founded, and the arrogance and obvious conflicts of interest on the part of medical science are both massive problems. "A worthwhile technology, increasingly badly mishandled" might sum things up.
Jeff, there's been some evidence of massaging of data in climate change science, though nothing like as much as the right likes to claim. The joke's on our species, though, because even the estimates based on fudged data are turning out to be way too conservative -- things that were not expected for decades are already happening. As for anarcho-capitalism, I glanced over it years ago and rolled my eyes -- it's a very familiar kind of nonsense that catches on among the clueless privileged, who haven't noticed that the rule of law established by government is the only thing that keeps their privileges intact, their wealth protected, and their throats uncut.
H. Bustos, agreed -- most of the people I've encountered who think they're post-Nietzscheans, or for that matter anti-post-Nietzscheans, don't appear to have grappled with the issues Nietzsche raised at all.
Blue Sun, exactly. "In the way of progress" -- such perfectly vacuous buzzwords, given apparent meaning only by the folk mythology of our time!
Matthias, look into the rise of the mystery religions and Christianity in the late classical world. As I read it, it was exactly the failure of rational philosophy to solve the problems of that age that drove so many people to religious revelation instead.
Blue Sun, Pence is impeachment insurance. Trump knows perfectly well that he's likely to end up facing a Democrat-controlled Congress at some point in his time in the White House, so he wants someone as VP that Democrats absolutely can't stand.
Ed-M, that is to say, we have a kleptocracy rather than a democracy -- a system in which those with influence use it to plunder the system. That also has its rules.
Nick, yep. I've seen the same thing way too often.
Sara, Hancock frustrates me, because he combines a lot of interesting material with an inattention to historical detail that I find embarrassing. I've read most of his books; all things considered, though, I find Hapgood's original book better. As for May, yes, that startled me. If the Tories actually follow up on May's words with actions to better the lives of working class Britons, Labour is in even deeper trouble than it presently appears to be.
7/17/16, 6:53 PM
onething said...
I have the Milton book and I think a lot of his work, but he is not a young earth creationist. I have followed the arguments of intelligent design quite a bit, but it stands alone with or without any particular religion, although many adherents are religious.
7/17/16, 7:11 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
Then we'll have the rapid succession of Jimson Weed ... Gurney...what's-her-hame...and one other, a.k.a. The Year of the Four Presidents, followed by a sturdy common-sense country-boy veteran, probably a Gen-Xer, who presides over the recovery as Eisenhower did over the last one. Io, Vespasian!
It was Vespasian who fixed the Empire's debt problem by, among other things, a tax on the public latrines. When the Roman upper classes snickered and made scatological jokes about it, he answered back "The money doesn't stink!" OK, not Ike - Lyndon B?
7/17/16, 7:12 PM
onething said...
7/17/16, 7:14 PM
John Michael Greer said...
234567, by all means include a link when you want to post something like that -- that can be overdone, but when it's relevant it's welcome. Yes, indeed, it's going to be a very rough road from here on down!
Barrigan, fascinating. I haven't read much recent science fiction at all -- I got bored several decades ago with the endless rehashing of the same old themes -- so had missed that.
Shane, experienced hands are exactly what Trump doesn't need. If he tries to pursue this campaign along the lines of ordinary politics, he might still lose. He wins by going right over the heads of the political system, speaking to the people, and saying the things they want to hear -- which are not the things Clinton or any of the Dems are saying, now that Bernie's dropped out.
Kevin, no, there you're falling into a common fallacy. There is no optimum diet shared by all human bodies, because human bodies differ from one another in a galaxy of ways due to heredity, environment, health conditions, and life history. Thus they need different diets. In the same way, there is no definition of the good life that fits all, for the same reasons. Human beings are not interchangeable components, and the modern attempt to treat them as such is at the root of a good many of the preventable disasters of our time.
Mark, interesting. Many thanks for the input!
Allexis, I've discussed this with college professors, and they say the same thing -- their students who play lots of computer games are consistently bad at solving real world problems, and the more obsessively they play them, the worse they get. The thing I'd point out is that nearly all of the problems faced in the real world are not deliberately designed and set up by human beings for the purpose of entertainment, the way problems in computer games are. As it happens, I would readily agree that too much science fiction reading also leads to certain cognitive problems -- you have no idea how often I run up against people whose ideas about technology are completely shaped by science fiction, and as a result they have a very hard time getting their heads around how limited, and limiting, technology actually is. Equally, too much fantasy fiction is not an advantage to the student of occultism, for similar reasons!
I think it's quite possible to balance computer gaming with plenty of experience solving problems that haven't been invented by a human being for the purposes of entertainment, and avoid the problem I (and the teachers with whom I've discussed this issue, one of whom is a former gamer) have noticed. I trust you'll do that, so that your choice of entertainment doesn't limit your cognitive ability -- just as I balance my reading of science fiction and fantasy with plenty of other material, nonfiction as well as realistic fiction, to keep my choice of entertainment from limiting mine...
Synthase, yes, you've just demonstrated my point. That attitude makes it impossible for you to relate to people who don't share your ideas about evolution, even if there are plenty of other subjects on which constructive mutual action would be a good idea -- and politically speaking, that's just dumb. By contrast, if you accept that nobody you meet is ever going to agree with you about everything, and learn to look for common ground and bracket the disagreements rather than looking for an opportunity to cast heretics into the outer darkness with wailing and gnashing of teeth, your chances of bringing about constructive change are much higher, and you might even succeed in convincing the creationists with whom you interact that, despite Richard Dawkins, evolutionists really can be decent human beings...
7/17/16, 7:17 PM
Nathan Donaldson said...
This is not a comment but rather a message. I am consistent reader of your blog & sometime reader some of your books. I now have a website of my own that I think you would enjoy taking a look at. It's mostly my photography but also has about 14000 words of writing that I'd appreciate you checking out. Several of the themes of your blog are present there. The address is www.theamericancommons.net. Thanks.
Nathan
7/17/16, 7:20 PM
John Michael Greer said...
With regard to upstate New York, welcome to the rest of America! As for lawn signs, I see a fair number of Trump signs in the poor parts of town, and there was one big Bernie sign in the well-to-do part of Greene Street, though it's been taken down now. I have never seen a Hillary sign, bumper sticker, or button. If Cumberland's a surrogate for middle America, her campaign is in very deep trouble.
Owen, the thought of engineers as demons reminds me irresistibly of a bit from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, so thank you!
Over the Hill, you're welcome.
Zach, where did you see that? I occasionally miss something, and that's not a turn of phrase I would normally put through.
FLwolverine, nah, Pence is impeachment insurance. No Democrat is going to vote to impeach Trump if that means Pence is going to get the presidency. This notion that the Donald is somehow going to step aside and not become president strikes me as a remarkable bit of wishful thinking, by the way; it would be exactly his style to serve four or eight years, and then go on to something else, with all the perks and income ex-presidents get to feed his ego.
Nestorian, now, now -- the coming of the Antichrist, if I understand Christian theology correctly, is an event ordained by God as part of the sequence that leads to the Second Coming. If God's decided that now's the time for the Antichrist to pop up, who are you to stand in the way?
(It also occurs to me to ask whether Christian scripture requires the Antichrist to be male. If you want someone who likes to start wars and behaves with a remarkable lack of interest in morality, it seems to me, Hillary Clinton might be as good a candidate. I'll see if I can figure out how to make her name add up to 666... ;-)
Ramaraj, thank you for the reminder -- it's been way too long since I've read Ortega y Gasset.
John, I'm not a great fan of the "great ages" concept myself, as you may have gathered! My own astrological interests these days tend to focus on what I suppose you'd have to call early modern astrology -- Alan Leo and Llewellyn George's astrology, the sort that was practiced in the era that gave rise to the occult systems I work with -- and while those give lip service to the "age of Aquarius" business, it doesn't have any significant role in their practical work, which is just as well.
Thymia10, oh, it's going to get far more absurd. Pass out the popcorn!
7/17/16, 8:19 PM
zerowastemillennial said...
Firstly, the people that design video games are often engineering-minded themselves, whether concept artists or programmers, so their problems that they tend to create for players to solve encourage that kind of thinking. It most definitely fosters a withdrawal from the nuanced complexity and non-linearity of reality that video games cannot, by their nature, replicate in any way. When games try to recreate real life instead of tell a linear, satisfying story... beware the buttmad. (I'm thinking in particular of a particular unwinnable game about mental illness that came out a few years ago that was met with near unanimous hatred. And when a game gets a reception like that, of course that's just going to go into the feedback loop of what *is* an acceptable video game to make and headspace to foster while submerged in the game world.)
Correlation isn't causation, obvs, but skyrocketing rates of actual mental illness is rarely ever helped in any way that can be called genuine healing by video games. I can't find any statistics, suffice to say that dissociative disorders are mental illnesses, and if mental illnesse rates are going up across the board, then DP/DR is too.
7/17/16, 9:45 PM
patriciaormsby said...
In response to Shane's query on Turkey, the best analysis I've seen of the reported events of the past three days was given by the Saker here: http://thesaker.is/failed-coup-in-turkey-a-few-initial-thoughts/
His blog specializes in following the military situation in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. If the Saker's analysis is correct, we have less to fear from the further empowerment of the neocons that a Clinton presidency would entail, and is my biggest reason for opposing her ("Whore of Babylon" LMFAO), because the push to control Syria has effectively been hobbled for the time being. Moreover, it appears that Erdogan decided about a month ago that it'd be safer for Turkey to "cozy up" to Russia, which says a lot about shifting power.
He says he still doesn't know which of America's "multiple personalities" actually backed the coup.
7/17/16, 9:57 PM
Unknown said...
JMG, my views on vaccination are similar to yours. I think a moderate view is common among people my age, which is to say early Baby Boomers. When we were born, a handful of vaccines existed. If our parents had access to medical care, as infants we received the combination shot DPTP which was for diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus and something else that starts with a p. When we were school age we had to be vaccinated for smallpox. Then an effective polio vaccine was developed, and everyone wanted their children to have it, because they remembered Franklin Roosevelt and knew children who died of polio, wore braces on their legs or spent their days in an iron lung.
I think the vaccine issue illustrates the law of diminishing returns. Smallpox was such a serious disease and so contagious that even the risky eighteenth century version of the vaccine was worth taking as a preventative measure. The other early vaccines were for diseases both contagious and lethal, or in the case of lockjaw, just a horrible way to die. People weren’t as mindful of side effects to medical treatment then, but if they had been, the benefits of protecting one’s children from those diseases far outweighed the risks.
A lot of the vaccines that have come on the market since the 1960s seem to me to have more even risk/benefit ratios. IMO people ought to be encouraged rather than coerced into receiving them, and requiring infants to be vaccinated for diseases that they are not likely to be exposed to is abominable.
7/17/16, 11:34 PM
Unknown said...
JMG, you wrote, "If the Tories actually follow up on May's words with actions to better the lives of working class Britons, Labour is in even deeper trouble than it presently appears to be."
A while back you introduced me to the Lawyers, Guns and Money blog, and I've been spending way too much time over there. They are closed-minded and intolerant on some issues, but the comments sections often include laugh-out-loud runs of wordplay, and some blog entries cover British politics closely. A day or two ago, a comment to one of the post-Brexit blog posts pointed out that the Tories have a history going back more than a century of implementing reforms that benefit the working class every now and then; that their flexibility in this respect is one reason why they have been the majority party in Parliament most years for a very long time. Unfortunately I cannot remember the specific examples of reforms listed in the comment, but there were at least half a dozen of them. This would seem to be an example of Burkean conservatism--make changes when necessary to preserve the class system, law and order.
7/17/16, 11:50 PM
ed boyle said...
Following up on that thought I would ask religionists if perhaps another animal with high intelligence and long life span has a vision of god as being dolphin, elephant, etc and have mythologies perhaps if not orally then telepathically transmitted over thousands of years and if life exists elsewhere in the universe the same phenomenon occurs. We all, all life forms, consider the obvious eternal questions, wherever we come into existence. I read a book by a former fundy who got cured by going to bible university and reading original texts. The copying from generation to generation by monks allowed more mistakes and bias creep in than actual words in text itself. Original text is lost. Meaning is hopelessly distorted by this process and by politics. Science perhaps no better and history as well. Each generation gives everything its own meaning.
Predicament without simple solution is what we face now. Out of box thinking is not accepted by elite so outsiders like Trump, internet channels win. There are no easy solutions to PO crisis, overpopulation, terrorism, climate change as this is not a chess match. Trump, hordes of terrorists, banking evildoers are like genghis khan. This is like in the jungle where a sort of 'invisible hand' of egoism dtermines fate of world. The most evil sociopath is the most creative and intelligent while the civilized, domesticated modern human plays by the rules, works, pays taxes, believes lies and ends up dead.
7/18/16, 12:20 AM
Synthase said...
7/18/16, 3:34 AM
Robert Mathiesen said...
7/18/16, 3:49 AM
onething said...
7/18/16, 6:17 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
Science and the scientific method are a whole nuther matter of course. They are tools, not a worldview. Turning them into a religion is the problem. As an aside note, something akin to the scientific method (empirical evaluation of ideas by observation and experiment) can be used in other frameworks. The Bible suggests something like this approach when it tells you "By their fruit shall ye know them."
Dawkins in no way speaks for all evolutionary biologists or other scientists. Many despise his dogmatic atheism masquerading as science.
And I should note to Nestorian that the changes in evolutionary theory over time are the changes that all scientific theories go through over time as more information becomes available. It is modification of the theory based on new observations. It's not really a close parallel to your own process of aligning observation with immutable doctrine via any conceivable means.
7/18/16, 6:33 AM
Eric S. said...
7/18/16, 7:40 AM
John Roth said...
The idea of day and night rulers comes from Medieval and Renaissance astrology, and is one of many things that has been lost in “modern” astrology. The simplified version is that if you were born at night, that Jupiter in Pisces would be emphasized because of the night rulership, while if you were born during the day, that Jupiter would not get the boost in importance from being in the sign of its rulership. You can see some of this in the Major Arcana of the Tarot, which was used to teach basic astrology during the Renaissance in a way that kept it out of the hands of the Church. The card for Pisces is Fortitude, which, while it’s one of the classical virtues, is not a “nice” virtue: it’s needed during the bad times.
Jupiter is called the Great Benefic because that’s exactly what it is: in hororary and in transit analysis, Jupiter tends to bring the goodies. It doesn’t say how it brings them, however. One of the very few large-scale studies of the effects of the planets demonstrated fairly conclusively that Jupiter is not a “nice” planet in that regard. Those benefits are just as likely to be unearned as earned, and they’re just as likely to come from someone else’s misfortune than from good fortune that benefits everyone. Jupiter is the heavyweight that gets its own way because it is the heavyweight, not because of any moral or pragmatic goodness.
As to why your teachers didn’t mention it. A lot got lost during the Endarkenment. For several centuries astrologers were rather thin on the ground; the art didn’t start to be revived until it got included in Masonic symbolism, and didn’t really take off until the latter part of the 19th century. By then a lot had been lost. Modern psychological astrology was a late 19th century invention, motivated by a desire to keep Alan Leo out of jail for fortune-telling.
I’m hoping that JMG gets into it sometime on the other blog.
7/18/16, 8:39 AM
John Roth said...
@Shane W re: Sanders
Talking about whether Sanders “sold out” is the “great man” fallacy. The fundamental question is whether the populist movement that rallied around Sanders will jell into something that will have long-term influence.
@Heather
Muphry’s Law states that any post complaining about someone else’s grammatical errors will contain at least one very blatant grammatical error of its own.
Re: Teresa May
I noted her comment about actions to better the lives of the working class. Interestingly, this is the right time in the 80-year historical cycle for this to appear - it’s time for actions to stabilize the situation, which clearly means bringing more of a balance to the class structure. The same thing needs to be done here, although I don’t see either of the current two candidates being up to the job.
On this topic, though, I’ve got a question to think through: if it comes to draconian measures to bring the financial mess to heel, who do you think the overlords of that mess will be more willing to listen to? A blowhard who most banks will no longer have business with, or someone who they’ve known and worked with over the years?
7/18/16, 8:40 AM
John Roth said...
@Nestorian
We could get into an interesting discussion about cherry-picking arguments to support positions. I’m going to mention just one thing here: modern evolutionary biology does not depend on Darwin. The intellectual roots go back to Mendel and the mathematical techniques of population genetics in the 1920s and 1930s. Nothing in Darwin would let you understand a contention that, for example, 50% of adult personality comes from one’s parents, 10% from one’s home and school environment and 40% from unknown causes. For that you need the techniques and mathematics of population genetics.
There’s an old, and somewhat cynical, question and response that goes like this: how do you tell the difference between a religious believer and a scientist? The believer wants to know what the founder of their faith said, the scientist wants to know what the latest results from the laboratory say.
Trying to critique or disprove evolution by reference to what Darwin said is simply going to be ignored by the people actually working in the field as the ravings of someone who doesn’t know the least bit of what they’re talking about.
7/18/16, 8:40 AM
Dan Bashaw said...
Back on topic: The discussion of scientists’ and engineers’ often spectacular failures in the political realm reminded me of the brief flourishing of the Technocracy movement back in the 1930s. I looked it up and found a familiar name: M. King Hubbert, founder of peak oil theory, along with a self-taught engineer named Howard Scott, was one of the founders of this spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to create a new politics based on physical science.
Technocracy is an interesting case study of science-based ideas combining with political naivety and failing spectacularly in the real world!
(Which is not to say it was uninteresting. Technocracy was one of several political experiments in the early 20th century that was outside of the left-right political spectrum, and I figure they all are worth learning from.)
7/18/16, 8:46 AM
Nancy Sutton said...
http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/34794-us-guardian-elite-rulers-date-back-to-nation-s-founding
7/18/16, 8:53 AM
onething said...
Perhaps you would state more clearly what you mean by young earth. Do you mean 24-hour days of creation, or just that the earth might be only several thousand years old? Why does the resurrection require that genesis be fairly literal? Is it because of the belief in a perfected cosmos that then fell and will be perfected again? Or is the problem more with the human race itself needing to have had a spiritual fall recently?
7/18/16, 9:55 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
7/18/16, 10:31 AM
Chris Smith said...
I think Searle making an assumption in "Minds, Brains, and Programs" about the nature of consciousness. From the abstract of that article:
(1) Intentionality in human beings (and animals) is a product of causal features of the brain. I assume this is an empirical fact about the actual causal relations between mental processes and brains. It says simply that certain brain processes are sufficient for intentionality. (2) Instantiating a computer program is never by itself a sufficient condition of intentionality. The main argument of this paper is directed at establishing this claim. The form of the argument is to show how a human agent could instantiate the program and still not have the relevant intentionality. [...] “Could a machine think?” On the argument advanced here only a machine could think, and only very special kinds of machines, namely brains and machines with internal causal powers equivalent to those of brains.
I have read that article multiple times and still have with no idea what an 'internal causal powers equivalent to those of brains' which are 'sufficient for intentionality' actually are. Moreover, he states that he is making an assumption here. (Unlike too many authors, he is forthright that his assumption is an assumption.) This is why I wrote earlier, if we take as given his belief about the consciousness (i.e. that it results from certain 'internal causal powers' in brains) that we may conclude that consciousness is what he thinks it is (i.e. certain 'internal causal powers' in brains). If I reject his initial premise, I won't be persuaded to his viewpoint (but may enjoy his paper nonetheless).
My response to the Chinese Box thought experiment it that it could not pass a Turing test in the first place. For those unfamiliar with this thought experiment, The Box contains a non-Chinese speaking/reading person receiving inputs in Chinese, using a rule book to return designated Chinese outputs. The question Searle poses is does it make any sense whatsoever to say that the Box understands Chinese? But let me ask another question about the Box first: could the box pass a Turning test?
I don’t think it could. For one thing, its response time would be too slow to imitate conversation in a way that is indistinguishable from a person. (Turing himself notes that a digital computer would have to be able to respond in a time frame similar to a human to play to pass.)
Moreover, Searle gives no indication that the person in the box has any knowledge of conditions exterior to the box. Nor does he indicate how the rule book might accommodate that information. So for instance, If I ask the Chinese Box (in Chinese of course) what the weather is like, and it always replies “sunny” no matter what the weather is actually like, then it is not going to pass a Turing test.
On the other hand, what if we speed up the processing of the Box? We could allow the human processor in the box to consult her rule book at superhuman speeds so that she can return outputs at the speed of conversation, or replace her entirely with a computer or robot that can do so. Add information about the external world that influences its output. (This is essentially the “Systems”/”Yale” reply that Searle considers.)
Now ask the question, does this enhanced Chinese Box know how to speak Chinese? I don’t think the answer is so clear unless we are willing to import some further ideas about consciousness. If we import behaviorism (as Turing would) then we would agree that the enhanced Box knows Chinese because it behaves as such. Searle might object (and I’m not clear on this point, Searle hedged when I asked him after a guest lecture he gave several decades ago) because even the enhanced box remains overly mechanistic (or at least more mechanistic then we imagine our thought processes to be). Then again, how mechanistic are our brains? Maybe that really is how language works for us? I don’t know.
7/18/16, 11:00 AM
Erik Buitenhuis said...
I see. Yes, I did notice that there was a juggernaut of hot air at the time. And so did David MacKay:
https://www.withouthotair.com/
7/18/16, 11:08 AM
Nastarana said...
Impeachment insurance is part of the story, but not all of it. Gingrich might have done for impeachment insurance. Of course, The Newt is only slightly less hated than Mme. Clinton.
Pence has a nice Christian, photogenic family and has clearly been given instructions to feature said family in appearances and social media. This, of course, is an attempt to divert attention from the Trump harem and the spoiled rich kid offspring, including his big game trophy hunting sons.
The Republicans are counting electoral votes, an exercise which the Democrats as yet seem to believe is beneath them. Trump must have the South and most of the Midwest to win.
Pence is backed by the Koch brothers. Trump apparently has decided to deal with the Koches rather than Sheldon Adelson with his warmongering Zionism and his laundered Chinese money.
There is also a back story regarding Pence's governorship. I don't know all the details, but it involves a law passed by the Indiana legislature and signed by Pence which had the LGBT faction in an uproar. According to the pro-Pence side, the offending law was required to be rescinded by a gang of billionaires who flew into Indiana threatening various sorts of economic woe to the state should it persist in its' heresy. This incident infuriated conservative catholics, whose votes Trump would dearly like to have.
7/18/16, 11:11 AM
jessi thompson said...
7/18/16, 11:31 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
7/18/16, 1:29 PM
Unknown said...
If speculating on the outcome of the Presidential election is allowed this week, here's an observation I haven't seen elsewhere. A recent national poll had the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson at eleven percent. Six polls in four swing states taken about a week ago gave Johnson between six and nine percent. In five of the six polls, Johnson's share of the vote was larger than the difference between the two front runners. The Green Party nominee Jill Stein received less than half the support that Johnson did.
I haven't paid attention to third party candidates' poll numbers in previous elections. There have been years when celebrity candidates drew enough votes in the actual election to affect the outcome. It looks to me as if Johnson's numbers are abnormally high for a third party candidate who is neither wealthy or famous, but I could be mistaken.
I bring this up because third party support at this phase in the campaign may not be solid. Stein's numbers are too low to make a difference, but suppose half of Johnson's supporters think better of it and decide to vote for a major party candidate. I can't see Libertarians voting for Clinton. I can see some of them voting for Trump. About half of Johnson's voters switching to Trump would be enough to wipe out Clinton's lead in some swing states where she currently leads Trump.
7/18/16, 2:26 PM
Ed-M said...
That someone is Donald Trump's ghostwriter Tony Schwartz. “I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all
7/18/16, 2:54 PM
zach bender said...
7/18/16, 2:57 PM
Twinruler334 said...
7/18/16, 3:39 PM
nuku said...
“This is, of course, a circular mode of reasoning, in that I am presupposing a faith-based conclusion and then creating an intellectually plausible conceptual edifice that encompasses biblical studies, ancient history, empirical science, etc, to sufficiently justify that conclusion to myself. This deviation from the strict requirements of logical thought cannot be avoided, as all reasoning involving faith-based pre-conceived beliefs as conclusions to be justified is circular in this way.“
It looks to me that you are trying so very hard to have it both ways: a belief in Christianity based on faith and also based on logical reasoning. The end result is you simply end up chasing your own tail!
Since logically you’ll never prove that any of the Christian dogmas are “true” in a historical sense, why not just give it up and accept that you simply need to have faith in Jesus and your literal reading of creation presented in the bible? Isn’t that enough for you?
In my view, the central mistake of Christianty is exactly its Incarnation dogma, the assertion that its central One-God/Man was a historically real person instead of an out-of-time mythical character. That’s the one major difference between it and its predicessor Judiasm. The Jews had the Messiah figure, but he is always “coming”, always just out of Time.
7/18/16, 4:16 PM
Scotlyn said...
7/18/16, 4:37 PM
Shane W said...
I'm kinda confused about "more scarier". Reading the sentence, I intended "more" to link to "than" in making the comparison between Pence and Dubya. In my mind, it was connected to "than", not "scarier". Of course, taken alone "more scarier" is a redundant use, as the "-ier" ending means "more". Should it properly read, "more scary than Dubya" or just "scarier than Dubya"? IDK.
Even businesses that have "Employee's only" signs (which employee owns the "only"? which employee does this "only" belong?) still don't have signs marking the "bathrooms" LOL
7/18/16, 5:18 PM
Shane W said...
it was a state RFRA (religious freedom restoration act). Indiana's was particularly broad in creating exemptions to civil rights laws, particularly sexual orientation and gender identity. Indiana has not included sexual orientation nor gender identity in its civil rights laws, tho local ordinances exist in places like Bloomington, Indy, etc. The compromise Pence crafted after the uproar left both sides wanting and pleased neither the religious right nor the LGBT community.
7/18/16, 5:23 PM
rabtter said...
Hi Netstorian,
Curious here. How do you fit the distance measurement of 168K light years to SN1987a into your framework? In 1987 there was supernova, prior to which we had a distance measurement via various indirect means in typical use by astronomers.
The dying star sometime before it exploded produced rings much like those on Eta Carinae. Some months after the initial explosion we observed light that had reflected off those rings. This gave a rare opportunity of getting a direct measurement with the use of simple trigonometry of 168K light years.
Of course like Setterfield you can postulate a faster speed of light in the past and get the light to us much quicker, but then it gets to the ring much quicker also and you have to proportionately move the ring farther out to maintain the measured angular distance, so you really just change how far away it is and not how long it took the light to get here.
Generously allowing that you can tamper with the speed of light without physics coming unraveled, there's also the spectral signatures of Cobalt decay displaying the expected half lives. Consider that Cobalt 56 has a half life of 77 days, and we expect (and did) see its spectral signature. So, in the stream of photons coming from the supernova, there is a bubble in the pipe 77 light days long with predictable spectral signatures with regard to Cobalt 56. Had light speed been faster when the Cobalt was decaying, the bubble in the pipe with its spectral signature would have been proportionately longer.
7/18/16, 5:59 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Dermot, exactly. The politics of the last three decades have been predicated on making sure that working people have no one speaking up for their interests anywhere in the political system. Corbyn's putting that at risk; no wonder they're out for his blood.
Iuval, interesting. I've also been told that in a lot of university programs, the students don't actually do experiments at all -- they run computer simulations of experiments, thus guaranteeing that they get the right answers (and aren't exposed to the equivocal and stochastic nature of much experimental evidence). That plus the process you've described are certain death.
Gottfried, it's a source of much amusement to me that every time Trump turns around, somebody is claiming that his campaign is self-destructing; then he goes on to win more votes. I think quite a bit of wishful thinking is on display here.
Bob, yep. The most ummentionable fact in today's global politics is the accelerating decline of US power.
Shane, I think turkey is really tasty, especially with stuffing and cranberry sauce. ;-)
Jason, exactly; Trump as a person is far less important than Trump as a phenomenon -- the fact that he's done so perfect an end run around the entire mechanism of US politics is a huge sign that dramatic change is impending.
Cortes, good. Rationalists always forget that reason isn't an effective way to motivate human behavior -- even among rationalists.
Hammer, I think electrical and electronic engineering is a very good choice, as electricity's going to be around for many decades yet, and may be maintained on a small scale in some places straight through the impending dark ages. You might consider getting a ham radio license and doing some homebrewing of radio gear, as a good source of real-world experience in improvised electronics.
Barrigan, that makes sense. Most of what I've done with mundane astrology so far has involved ingress charts for national capitals and the classical doctrine of the great conjunctions, but the movements of fixed stars through the tropical signs are potentially a useful field of work. As for "planet nine," the imagination and discovery of planets is important, and so is their disappearance or downlisting -- the period when Ceres was a planet was also the great era of Romanticism, for example, and the history of Pluto (hypothesized, discovered, and cast out of the list of planets) corresponds exactly to certain definite changes in popular culture, society and technology; a similar case can be made for nonexistent planets such as Vulcan. I'm actually contemplating a book on this...
7/18/16, 6:28 PM
John Michael Greer said...
Ed, how old are your boys?
Synthase, good point -- most "mad scientists" in the media are actually mad technologists, of course. As for the truly great creations of the human intellect, the list I had in mind is spoken language, writing, formal mathematics, logic, mysticism (understood here as the use of meditative and other methods to awaken the less obvious potentials of human consciousness), and the scientific method. I'd be willing to listen to arguments, but to my mind these are the truly towering achievements, the ones that completely transformed how we relate to ourselves and the universe. One implication of the list is that it's very early days yet for science; we're in the initial burst of giddy enthusiasm, after which we can expect millennia of careful sorting, adjustment, and honing, until its potentials have been fully developed.
Patricia, I remember that sort of literature class -- a total waste of time even for people like me, who weren't engineering geeks!
7/18/16, 7:03 PM
Yellow Submarine said...
7/18/16, 7:48 PM
John Michael Greer said...
LatheChuck, ah, but as I noted in the post, it's not just that a lot of crackpot theories get written by engineers -- it's that crackpot theories written by engineers tend to be both wilder and more obsessively detailed than those by non-engineers. You don't get the sort of airy handwaving that Ignatius Donnelly, for example, used to leap blithely over the difficulties with his Atlantis theory: no, from an engineer, you get pages and pages of delightfully absurd calculations and hypotheses. They really were the best.
Sgage, nice. Thank you.
Scotlyn, fair enough. That seems like a reasonable extension of Hagbard's Law -- shall we call it Scotlyn's Corollary?
Mon Seul Desir, the change to white rice may also be a factor, but it remains the case that peasant cuisine in every Asian country whose cooking I know anything about is not strictly rice-based, but involves a fair amount of vegetables, including some with quite a bit of carotene. One of the reasons this was common is that you can grow enough of those vegetables to make a difference in your diet on little scraps of land too small to be economical as a rice paddy under traditional village conditions. The shift away from village-based agriculture to industrial monoculture turned peasants into employees with no land of their own and thus no place to grow vegetables -- ergo, vitamin A deficiency among many other things.
Grebulocities, many thanks.
Shane, no, I think Sanders would happily have gone on to run for the presidency and put in as many social-democrat policies as he could. Exactly what pressures were put on him to make him endorse Clinton is an interesting question.
Tom, exactly -- they want to apply the precautionary principle to climate but not to GMOs. Why? Follow the money...
Martin, but I said that crackpot literature by engineers was one of the delights of my misspent childhood! Besides, according to William Stukeley, Stonehenge was built by intelligent elephants, so engineers could at most have provided the operating staff.... ;-)
Submarine, exactly. We're not guaranteed a domestic insurgency in the short term yet, though we could certainly have one. If the pace of extrajudicial executions by police and violent reprisals against police keeps up, I'd expect to see suicide bombings and roadside IEDs by next year at the latest, and then we're in for it. On the other hand, given some serious restraint on the part of both sides, that doesn't have to happen.
Nathan, so noted and thank you. I've put your comment through, as I suspect some of my readers will also enjoy your blog.
Patricia, I'd be willing to serve as the head of a provisional government, but only until proper elections can be held, in which I won't run. After that, like the other retired presidents, I can sit in the Senate and make a pest of myself. ;-)
Unknown Deborah, two good points. Thank you.
Ed, you know, we all end up dead sooner or later anyway.
Synthase, if the scientific method is only one of many paths to truth, why does it upset you so much when some people say, "Sorry, that's not the path I'm following"? I suspect -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- that your response to, say, Nestorian's path to truth is about the same as his response to yours; would he be justified in feeling the same way about your dismissal of his path as you do about his dismissal of yours?
7/18/16, 10:40 PM
Shane W said...
@Yellow Submarine,
perhaps the mindset should not be one of praying to avoid a Civil War, but, given that a Civil War is coming, praying for the strength and fortitude to get through it sanely and in one piece? Perhaps if you think that a Civil War is baked in at this point, it would be better to get it over with now, so that the process of recovery can begin? I still think there may be a small chance this Trump thing may avert a Civil War. Can't hurt to try it first to see...
7/18/16, 10:48 PM
John Michael Greer said...
By the way, since you and Shane read my comments on Trump differently, I'll be happy to clarify. I'm not a great fan of the Donald; at a conservative estimate, there must be tens of thousands of Americans who are better suited to become president than he is; it's just that Hillary Clinton is not one of them. Fortunately, since Maryland will vote for Clinton even if she appears on live television in prime time tearing open the throats of cute three-year-old children with her teeth, I can do the same thing you're doing, and put my vote where it will actually make a difference -- that is, to a third party candidate, to help shake up the "two parties, one set of policies" scam that's running this country into the ground.
Eric, you've earned tonight's Evilly Glowing Star of No Earthly Color for coming up with the most imaginative interpretation of 666 I think I've ever encountered. That said, if I were to become a false prophet, I suspect I'd end up shilling, not for the Great Beast, but for the Small And Rather Cute Beast, whose dread tribulation will consist of giving every true believer in progress painful bunions and a Star Trek replicator that, no matter what, just won't work.
Dan, when I was in my teens, Technocracy still had a storefront office in Seattle, and I got some of their literature. You're right that there's a lot to learn from movements that lie outside the suffocatingly narrow range of views that are considered permissible these days!
Nancy, thanks for the link.
Bill, we'll see!
Zach, thanks for this; it's been deleted. Mike p, if you want to repost without the ethnic labeling, I'd be happy to put it through.
7/18/16, 10:59 PM
Vesta said...
Engineers? Elephants? For goodness sake, don't you know Stonehenge was built by fat old contractors?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K7q20VzwVs
7/18/16, 11:14 PM
Synthase said...
As far as I'm concerned, other paths to truth either don't overlap with science, or where they do, they aren't in any real conflict with it.
7/18/16, 11:36 PM
Shane W said...
7/19/16, 2:30 AM
latheChuck said...
7/19/16, 3:02 AM
W. B. Jorgenson said...
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my question. While I disagree with you about the age of the Earth, I can respect your beliefs. I myself have taken a few controversial beliefs because they seem to provide more meaning to the world than empty materialism, and so understand where you're coming from.
Also, in response to people who view Nestorian being a YEC offensive: does it matter? Let people believe what they want, and only criticize the actions. Seems much better an idea to me. I leave you alone, you leave me, I think if people did that things would be much better.
7/19/16, 3:47 AM
Nestorian said...
1) I do not reject the scientific method at all. I see neither creationism nor evolutionism as empirically testable as such. Both constitute metaphysical presuppositions that it requires some measure of faith to accept (and also to reject).
2) The results of empirical science across the full range of scientific disciplines can each be accommodated to both of these competing metaphysical presuppositions with varying levels and degrees of anomalies, paradoxes, and unsolved problems.
3) After several years of research, I concluded that the number and degree of anomalousness with the results of empirical science is significantly less on the creationist account than on the evolutionist account.
4) Most evolutionists are blissfully unaware of the extent to which the attempt to reconcile evolutionary presuppositions with the results of empirical science across the disciplines is in fact fraught with anomalies, apparent contradictions, etc., etc. The Young Earth Creationist writers going back to the early 19th century have rendered a considerable intellectual service by pointing these anomalies out.
5) In so doing, this intellectual tradition offers a way around the cultural stranglehold that the evolutionary camp has exercised on Western Civilization for 2 centuries for those who want to evaluate the comparative merits of creationism versus evolutionism on their own, rather than have the results of the investigation intellectually predigested for themselves.
7/19/16, 4:40 AM
Nestorian said...
1) "The Modern Creationist Trilogy, Volume 2: Science," by Henry Morris and John Morris (1996).
2) "Shattering the Myths of Darwinism," by Richard Milton (1997).
[No, Milton is not a creationist, as one commenter pointed out. But that merely makes him all the more worth taking seriously by those who are inherently suspicious of religious creationists. Nor is Milton the only non-religious radical critic of evolutionary orthodoxy - far from it.]
7/19/16, 4:47 AM
Cherokee Organics said...
Well as you wisely say, it is a target rich environment.
Absolutely, a totem of their supposed greenness is too true. The stupid thing is I ran the generator for a few hours for the first time in three years and I felt really guilty because I know what a bad thing it is that I did. It is a shame more people don't feel that way.
Cheers
Chris
7/19/16, 5:08 AM
Scotlyn said...
I must, in all honesty, refuse the accolade as undeserved, and give credit to James C Scott, who in "Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts" proposed and developed the idea, illustrated with much ethnographic and historical material. https://books.google.ie/books/about/Domination_and_the_Arts_of_Resistance.html?id=tl9q9DbnkuUC&redir_esc=y
David Graeber develops the idea in a somewhat different way, adding the empathy angle missing from James C Scott's analysis.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/26/caring-curse-working-class-austerity-solidarity-scourge
My presentation of their insights was cursory at best.
7/19/16, 5:22 AM
Bill Pulliam said...
Nestorian -- I don't quite understand why you feel you do have to reconcile your belief in the literal truth of the Bible with empirical evidence. Isn't that trying to prove your faith, the original oxymoron? Why would you not simply accept that the apparent discrepancies between your belief and empirical data are just another of the great mysteries that are beyond our comprehension? Why does an all-loving all-powerful god cause good people to suffer? Why does the earth appear to be billions of years old? You accept the first as mystery, why not the second as well?
Even someone like me who accepts an ancient and evolving universe as fact, and does not believe in a single omnibenevolent omnipotent creator, accepts some things as fundamentally incomprehensible mysteries that I may only understand after death, if even then.
7/19/16, 6:03 AM
Josh said...
If TAC has any sense they'll pay you to write a regular column for their site.
7/19/16, 6:03 AM
Kevin Warner said...
Mmmmmm. That may be true, but you can find beliefs that can be used by most and I would call that an advance. It does not have to be perfect to work for most people. I am not talking about the macro-beliefs such as stoicism, solipsism, determinism, etc but the sort of smaller ideas that helps people get through their daily lives such as "Never back yourself into a corner that you can't get out of." World-changing idea? No, but eminently practical and worth remembering.
These practices and beliefs you will find scattered throughout religions, sayings, quotes, proverbs, self-help literature and the like but which has never much taken center stage in our civilization. In modern life, we have the field of applied physics but we do not have a field in applied morality. Do people still talk about wisdom these days?
Readers Esn and Scotlyn have already mentioned the idea that "all sin starts with treating people as things." I would call that thought a helluva foundation-stone for a set of applied moral tenets. If anybody here wants to chase the context of that quote, by the way, there is an extract at http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/terry-pratchett/58647 that is worth the read.
7/19/16, 7:31 AM
Matt said...
What are you going to be saying to people as you work the phone banks and pound the pavements? "Vote Trump or else more serious Trump supporters are going to start an insurgency"? Or are you going to join in echoing Trump's own bullpoop?
And do you have any evidence that the shooters in Dallas and Baton Rouge are disaffected Trump supporters? If not, it seems a bit ingenuous to imply that they are the start of your insurgency.
Matt
7/19/16, 8:34 AM
Matt said...
yes, the British Labour Party is in serious trouble, but I don't expect it to be exacerbated by any genuine turn towards the working class by the Tories. It's a classic posture for the start of a Tory regime: John Major promised to take us to a classless society, even Mrs T quoted St Francis of Assisi etc.
However, they may continue talking about working people as a PR manoeuvre to feed the Labour crisis.
It is quite impressive just how flexible they are prepared to be, in terms of spin and PR. Until about 10 minutes ago, it seems, to question austerity and the need to balance the budget put you on the extremist wing of the Left - even Corbyn and O'Connell only briefly flirted with it, before signing up for Osborne's Fiscal Charter - and then, in a heartbeat, Osborne has gone and it as if it all never really happened.
I am genuinely stunned at how effectively the Tories can make their own reality, and the media seems to trail along in their wake, treating it as almost impolite to ask: if we didn't need to balance the budgets, why didn't you say anything before?
Matt
7/19/16, 9:23 AM
Mark Rice said...
The aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan is in the South China Sea.
7/19/16, 9:59 AM
Dr. Mark Woodworth said...
If you can make it through reading Spengler, great, my hat's doffed to you. Better is Gibbons. Rise and fall, rise and fall, that's what civilizations, even tyrannical technocratic global ones (as the progressives have been trying to implement) do. The right tries to prop up the good old days, the left wants change that it can also benefit from. When there's no foreigner to blame, the enemy is each other. When we see the left fractured between socialists and neo-cons, when we see the right divided between big government neo-cons and populist/nationalists, we see the cycle is at work, tectonically pushing against status quo, slowly pushing toward something no one has a clue about.
Always ask cui bono. The left created began this race war to get elected back in 2012, that is, cranking up the victim divisive politics,. The right will promote what it always does: law and order. Both want control.
Get your family and friends ready as best you can. But don't forget to buy some popcorn, it will be interesting to watch the wheel turn.
7/19/16, 10:14 AM
A Post-Millennial said...
@A Post-Milennial, I share Nastarena's problem of Paypal not liking me. Since I do not remember in what form I told it my mother's maiden name, I cannot use it. Could I send you a good-old-fashioned check?
Yes, we worked out a system for accepting checks through snail mail. For details, message us at [email protected].
7/19/16, 10:48 AM
FLwolverine said...
7/19/16, 11:47 AM
Eric S. said...
@JMG: That’s what all you false prophets say. You promise us that the gods you’re heralding in are cute and little, and the next thing we know we’re lying prostrate before them, sacrificing children and chanting in the ancient tongue while they tear our cities to the ground ;-).
7/19/16, 12:08 PM
onething said...
"What I find so beyond the pale is denying that the scientific method is a path to truth. (note: -a- path, not -the- path.) That's a berzerk button that puts me on par with anyone from the middle ages. YECs, flat earthers, free energy buffs, etc all do it, implicitly or explicitly. "
I'm afraid I don't buy it. I don't think anyone is against the scientific method. They may resist its findings as best they can sometimes, but certainly scientists themselves do that as often as anyone. Some of the YEC scientists do indeed try to use science to INTERPRET the data it produces via the scientific method more to their own worldview. But in my opinion, no one does that more often than atheistic evolutionary scientists, who come to absurd conclusions (interpretations) all the time.
We all have agendas - which we often don't honestly assess. You have yours and you seem a bit blind to it.
7/19/16, 12:14 PM
Shane W said...
7/19/16, 1:36 PM
ed boyle said...
You think that perhaps 100, 000 years ago mankind with 1500 ccm brain (now 1350 ccm)but smaller frontal lobe than us was wilder, more violent, egoistic and less malleable to social control. Individuals were perhaps creative geniuses but had nothing to work with whereas as a society we can all build upon what others give us in infrastructure and culture. Individual identity being less important than the group intelligence as evolution of bees, ant colonies. So our evolution is individually 'regressive', collectively'progressive'. I recall an animation where a lot of identical characters telepathicaly connected spoke in unison, negatively star trek 'borg' colony. Religion is a way of synchronizing mind control. Mass media perhaps better. Problem is introducing enough genetic variety to maintain intelligence, robustness without destabilizing system. They are trying that now in USA, Europe. Is perhaps better long term to have a very mixed population which eventually is unique like in mexico or brazil. Worst situation is where everyone intermarries and cultural stasis or low intelligence, low disease resistance results. Is Japan better off? Pakistan with 55% cousin marrying? Social harmony better than melting pot, where is balance. Evolution is not an individual matter but a social, political, cultural, religious one. If a genius were to have spread his genes around the world it might change something but usually one or two childs for intellectuals.
7/19/16, 2:25 PM
Ed-M said...
Crikey. World War 3 dead ahead.
7/19/16, 3:09 PM
Bill Pulliam said...
Before you can seriously critique the fundamentals of any field, scientific or otherwise, you need to first UNDERSTAND them as they are understood by those who work in the field. Milton failed at this utterly.
7/19/16, 3:24 PM
Candace said...
http://www.startrek.com/database_article/enemy-within-the
7/19/16, 4:49 PM
Patricia Mathews said...
I have totally forgotten which book it was in, but it's value is shown by the fact that it sounds familiar to the point of being total cliche - as someone else said of Shakespeare. Nobody has to memorize it: it's all stuff we learned as children. And I should reacquire a copy for my library.
7/19/16, 4:50 PM
John Roth said...
Quite true. When your answer to every embarrassing question is “God did it that way,” then you’ve lost all hope of credibility other than to your co-religionists.
What probably surprises a lot of people in the anti-evolution camp is that most evolutionary biologists have no objection in principle to having God, gods, space aliens or whatever having some influence on the process. They just want evidence other than “you can’t explain this” and “it’s irreducibly complex.” To date, that evidence has not been forthcoming.
Granted, it’s a pretty high bar to cross. Proving that God had its thumb on the process is tantamount to proving that God exists. Finding a space alien’s tentacle-prints on the process is tantamount to not only proving that they exist, but they’ve been hanging around for a while.
7/19/16, 5:06 PM
Steve in Colorado said...
Worked in this case means different things. There were certainly cultures who could predict the movements of planets and predict eclipses without a sun-centered view of the universe. Worked also means in the social and political sense in preserving the status quo ("God is always right, the church and king are his spokespeople on earth, obey them").
As JMG has said, we have elevated the scientific method to the status of a god and it and its promise of progress have become our modern religion. But really they serve no other purpose than the myths and religious hierarchies of the past; they explain a bit of the world and serve to knit together the existing order of the day. Do they have their flaws, sure; and when they stop doing what they really are supposed to do, we have a revolution of one sort or another; as a new paradigm replaces the old.
That is the big story we are watching unfold. Whether in this upcoming election, climate change, social unrest they are all just part of the story. So pull up a chair, pass the popcorn and have some of your favorite beverage; may as well enjoy the show...
7/19/16, 5:35 PM
Unknown said...
One more observation on changing social attitudes toward vaccines. These days we are constantly pestered to donate money for research to cure various medical problems. I remember only one campaign of this kind in my childhood: the March of Dimes. Its goal was to find a cure for polio. It was highly publicized and people went door to door collecting donations. The purchasing power of a dime was equivalent to more than a dollar today, and dimes had Franklin Roosevelt's head on them.
Instead of a cure for polio, they found a means of preventing it, which was a great victory for public health. I believe Dr. Jonas Salk donated his patent rights, so won fame but not fortune. Big Pharma wasn't so big in those days, though the time of cranking out poorly tested new drugs to generate profits wasn't far off. The turning point for people's trust in medical advances was probably when they found out about the effects of thalidomide.
It didn't escape my notice that when the March of Dimes achieved its goal, it did not declare victory and close up shop. Instead it picked a different medical problem that can never be completely fixed (birth defects) and went right on collecting money.
7/19/16, 6:07 PM
onething said...
7/19/16, 7:10 PM
onething said...
7/19/16, 7:15 PM
rabtter said...
Your comment here,
"...the results of empirical science across the disciplines is in fact fraught with anomalies, apparent contradictions,"
Are you talking about things like moon dust and paluxy river bed tracks? Be wary of claimed anomolies. About 15 years I took on the task of fact checking a small book two preachers that frequented the area wrote. They relied heavily on writers like Morris, Gish, Thompson, Wysong, the usual suspects. I spent several years locating original sources for the claims. Many trips to a University Geology Library, ordering copies of articles in old out of print journals. I didn't make it all the way to the end (I had had enough), but I fact checked a couple dozen of the claimed anomolies and none of them panned out.
One did stick in my mind though, was an alleged claim by Bert Thompson of wagon tracks at a fossil bed in Texas which the geologist studying the place claimed were made by snakes. The citation for this was an audio tape by Bert Thompson, I purchased the audio tape to check it out, no mention of wagon tracks.
I was a regular visitor to the usenet group talk.origins at the time and had access to some paleontologists. Finally somebody gave me a name of who may have worked the site. I contacted him and concluded he was the right person after some correspondence. The property owner was indeed convinced the two parallel marks were wagon tracks, and was continually presenting him with plain old rocks and asking what kind of fossil it was. I asked about the snakes, he said that he did not think it was snakes at the time but really didn't know what made the marks. A couple of years later, he saw marks on a beach that he called "essentially the same" that were made by the outgoing tide dragging debris.
I confronted the preacher sometime later at a family member's house and asked about the tracks and explained that it wasn't on the citation given. He claimed to be live at that particular presentation and yes Bert Thompson did mention the tracks. I think his claim for that is something I can accept. I speculate that someone pointed out to Dr. Thompson that there were Dinosaur tracks all around, but there were no tracks left by a draught animal pulling the wagon, and thus it was removed from audio tape that was sold to the public.
In the meantime, some skeletons began rattling very loudly in Dr. Thompson's closet and he found it prudent to retire permanently to seclusion. A decade later he's still in seclusion so I can't find out in his own words the reasoning for removing from the audio that was sold.
Now the confrontation with the preacher. I wish I had handled this confrontation differently, some family were mad at me. The preacher, in his defense did say he will accept correction and as proof of that tabled paluxy as something he willingly gave up after visiting the site. He said he had some new stuff to send up to me, but never did. A year or so after that his home congregation kicked him out due to a problem arising from or related to plain old money, anybody I asked was embarrassed and really didn't want to talk about it. He hasn't been back to my area since that day.
There was some drama with that, but most fact checking is dull. The TalkOrigins website and google group are good resources for fact checking, lots of stuff there for Morris. Also check the primary source on which they base the claim.
Also stay up to date with creationist stance on various claims, many of the anomolies that were claimed 20 years ago have now been abandoned.
7/19/16, 7:20 PM
onething said...
That is most interesting and I was not aware of that stance. I think I have read some of the Morris stuff and don't remember anything like that. If they take a position like that, it really does make scientific investigation pretty much moot. I mean, there really can't be much conversation or debate.
I doubt Nestorian takes that view and in general, I agree with his 5 points, with the exception that while the creationists and Intelligent Design camps both are providing intellectual stimulation, I am not sure the YECers are also handling objections to their own views so much as pointing out fallacies in the evolutionary side.
That's why I'm solidly in the Intelligent Design camp. To my mind, at this time, they are the group most seriously and dispassionately following the evidence where it leads and least inclined to ad hominem and wandering off topic.
7/19/16, 8:09 PM
rabtter said...
I wanted to respond to your comment to W. B.
Falsifiability.
Well, yeah, its not difficult to see the difficulty. Consider the two statements,
1. Is X falsifiable?
2. Is X falsifiable with any of the available empirical data we have?
If the answer to 1 is yes it does not strictly mean the answer to 2 is yes.
With regard stretching evolution to fit empirical data consider the nature of the empirical data in question. If paleontologists starting chiseling fossil kangaroos out of the Middle Devonian basins in Norway starting tomorrow, I don't think there's anyway you can stretch current Evolutionary Theory to account for it. The theory itself may not be falsified, but some filled in blanks in its notional space would be. Creation Theory would have no problem with it.
Consider if a new unknown species was discovered that looked like a rabbit, is genetically close to a rabbit, yet it laid eggs from which its young hatched. No problem for Creation Theory, but the chaos it would cause for Evolutionary Theory would be unimaginable.
Okay, consider the punctuated equilibrium you mentioned. Falsifying it wouldn't falsify evolution as its just a filled in blank in its notional space, and filled in blanks in the notional space have been falsified before. Lamarckism was falsified, now we have epigenetics that has a very small overlap with it. Recapitulation was falsified, but embryology remains. Punctuated Equilibrium at some future date will be refined, or replaced with something that overlaps with it.
If you falsify some small filled in blank in Evolutionary Theory, you're just removing a blemish and ultimately end up improving it; essentially giving it a shave and a haircut. If you want to take a real bite out it, go for a major organ like Common Descent.
To go after Common Descent, you really the Nested Hierarchy and the various means it can be recovered. It you get a good handle on it you'll understand why I can make seemingly silly predictions like:
1. A Kangaroo Rat in southwest US genetically is closer to a Killer Whale than it is to
the Marsupial Mouse of Australia
2. A rat is genetically is closer to a giraffe than it is to a possum.
7/19/16, 8:32 PM
Unknown said...
@ed boyle--I have often thought about our bigger-brained ancestors and your comment gave me more to think about. I have many questions that will probably never be answered. Unless human understanding of the nature of consciousness progresses, at least with respect to understanding how the world is experienced by differently-brained current humans and by other intelligent species, we probably will be unable even to imagine most of the possible answers.
For example:
Did newborn Cro-Magnon infants have bigger heads than human babies today? If so, how did the mothers manage to bear them? Was the mortality rate from childbirth higher? If the infants had the same size heads as now, to grow to full size their childhood development must have been different from modern children, perhaps in duration, in personality development, and who knows what else.
Brain tissue is one of the most metabolically expensive kinds of tissue to maintain. What was the Cro-Magnon diet?
If they had 150 ccm more brain than us, but smaller frontal lobes, what were those extra neurons doing? I suppose we can make some wild guesses by comparison with what little we know about the brains of other intelligent mammals. The only guess I have any confidence in is that they probably had a much keener sense of smell. That's what a large part of a dog's brain is devoted to. Maybe Cro-Magnons had an innate sense of direction, better memories. Maybe they were more intuitive or telepathic.
I read a science fiction short story called House of Bones about a band of homo sapiens in a recent ice age when mammoths flourished and Neanderthals were still around. The setup was the usual stranded time-traveler, but the story centered on the culture and social interactions of the people. They had an oral epic about themselves, they were confident and pleased with life. It was a small band and one of their practices was that each of them had a name for each of the rest of them, and all the names were different, so if there were say fifteen people in the group, each of them had fifteen names and each person called you by the name he or she had given you. This seemed plausible to me. If your group's material culture can be mastered by the age of fifteen and basic survival needs don't take all your waking hours to procure, there is plenty of time to develop complicated non-material culture.
7/19/16, 9:56 PM
heather said...
Not to be pedantic, but since you asked, here's my understanding of the grammar in question: two-syllable adjectives that end in -y (scary, lonely, smelly, crazy- hey, I think there's a party game in here somewhere!) drop the -y and add -ier to form a comparative, thus scarier. Other adjectives just get "more" tacked on; never both. Interesting, huh? Now watch, this clarification will almost certainly bring the attention of the Grammar God(dess), who will manifest to point out the flaws in and exceptions to my explanation. ;)
Oh man, don't get me started on the abuse of apostrophes!
Don't you wish all our problems mattered so little and had such satisfyingly straightforward answers?
--Heather in CA
7/19/16, 10:24 PM
heather said...
The Grammar God(dess) has manifested on schedule (delightfully reliable, that One), in my head, pointing out so many obvious exceptions to my hasty generalization (yellower, or simpler, or cleverer, for a few), that I am forced to retract my slanderous claim that His/Her domain is straightforward. Instead I admit that English grammar is full of fascinating twists and turns, and I refer you to the high priests, such as Webster or Funk and Wagnalls. Mere grammar nerds such as myself should stay off the field. ;) (I do stand by the claims about two syllable adjectives ending in -y and "never both", though, at least until the next divine revelation. Also the bit about the potential for a party game, though I sadly fear that says more about me than about grammar.)
--Heather in CA
7/19/16, 11:12 PM
Scotlyn said...
7/20/16, 12:24 AM
Scotlyn said...
@Nestorian Can you say what you ses as the meaning of the historical Jesus is for, say, beetles? What is in it for THEM? At least both evolution and various forms of paganism grant that a) we are related and b) they are entitled to feel as central to their story as we are to ours. I do think it is possible for Christianity to embrace beetledom in this way, but not very commonly encountered. Anyway, well done for fielding all responses with poise.
7/20/16, 12:30 AM
Shane W said...
my guess is when the US goes under, Canada will put in place emergency measures pretty quickly. I've said it before, but I think if there were a decades long period of lawlessness in the US, Canada, or the provinces, may try to secure the border areas/states to protect trade on the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence, and after decades of lawlessness, the locals may very well welcome the sight of mounties bearing peace, order, and good government...
@Matt,
no, it'd be pretty mundane. there are plenty of issues that are good reason to vote for Trump: "hi, I'm Shane & I'm with the Trump for president campaign. (Pause) Will you be voting in the upcoming election? (Pause) Well, I'm voting for Trump because of his stance on trade and foreign intervention. (Pause) Yes, I know he has made controversial statements, but I think the issues are more important for our country..."
One of the other reasons it's so important that Trump get elected is because of what it will do to the other side. The only way the Democrats will implode and be replaced or remade in Sanders image is if, first, Donald Trump gets elected president. If, in the future, I want two viable candidates to vote for, like say Carter vs. Ford in '76, then first Trump must become president. This only becomes a transforming election, like Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan, if first Trump gets elected...
7/20/16, 2:34 AM
Synthase said...
This is what it looks like when multiple paths to truth is done right: http://www.casinapioiv.va/content/accademia/en.html
7/20/16, 4:07 AM
Nestorian said...
First, anomalies litter practically all the scientific disciplines insofar as they concern themselves with events in the remote past. A good book tallying up the anomalies that have arisen in the biological sciences in-depth is Duane Gish's "Creation Scientists Confront Their Critics." It's somewhat older, from the early 90s, and so does not take into account the more recent controversies in the Intelligent Design arena. Nevertheless, the anomalies Gish identifies are fundamental, and haves have by no means gone away in the interim.
And the Morris book that I mentioned several times represents a comprehensive attempt to identify the main anomalies in evolutionary thinking to be found across as many scientific disciplines as possible. The chapters on thermodynamics and the origin of life are particularly well done, in my opinion.
There are tons of other books and articles as well, dealing in depth with all of the various scientific disciplines, but this is not the time or place to develop a comprehensive annotated biography. Suffice it to say that an abundance of resources can be found easily using internet search tools for those with the inclination to do so. That's how I myself did it, after all.
Lastly regarding the Milton book, this was dismissed by one commenter as being based on an inadequate understanding of the sciences in question. But this was merely asserted, not argued or supported in any way, which means the assertion carries no weight in the discussion.
So I encourage any one who has an interest in the matter to read the book for themselves, and try to identify its alleged scientific inadequacies with as much specificity as possible.
7/20/16, 8:28 AM
Eric S. said...
Some more thoughts here as we start to crunch up near the end of the week, since we're starting to get into my territory:
Re: Punctuated Equilibrium: I remember in the previous debate, punctuated equilibrium was presented as an example of evolutionary biology begging the question. Punctuated equilibrium is basically just the law of succession in ecology applied to the fossil record. The basic idea is that most of the time, earth’s biosphere acts as a climax community, and it takes special circumstances to open up a proliferation of open niches that allow evolution to take place (either through niche formation, or through a catastrophe). One well documented example is the period of adaptive radiation that took place during the Paleocene epoch, the extinction of the dinosaurs wiped out most of the planet’s terrestrial K-selected species and what was left were mostly pioneer species and r selected generalists. Usually the process of selection is handled through migration, but if there are no k-selected species to settle a niche, either because there are none left, or because the niche has not yet been occupied, the process of evolution has to take over. In the case of the K-T extinction event, then, generalists such as mammals and small feathered dromeosaurs responded to intra-species competition by branching out into non-competing roles to differentiate their niches, which then created behavioral isolation on once unified populations, as well as selective pressure for specialization within each separate population. After about ten million years, with the beginning of the Eocene, all of the modern orders of mammals and birds we’re familiar with were around, and the earth had recovered once more to the point of having a mature biosphere, from there it took another 30 million years or so to reach the climax communities of the early Neogene, from which point earth’s biodiversity remained fairly stable until quaternary extinction event (which started with the last glacial period before humans came onto the scene and is still going on.)
Re Intelligent Design: My main issue there is that Intelligent Design, much like Creationism expands the definition of evolution to include things that are in no way a part of the theory of evolution. Evolutionary biology doesn’t concern itself with the origin of life, it concerns itself with the mechanism by which populations change over time (which is a far less controversial topic). There aren’t a whole lot of gaps in the step by step process of radiation from a common ancestor… rather the gaps into which intelligent design may still have some room to probe is the transition from the first proto-cells to the first living cells. Protocells are pretty easy to create under naturally occurring conditions, they even sometimes have primitive RNA chains inside… The problem is finding the transition from those protocells to fully functioning cells with ribosomes and complex enzymes (there are theories, but last I checked not much in the way of evidence). If there was an intelligent designer, that’s the level at which it would operate, and it certainly fits into the realm of reasonable hypothesis (though, it’s certainly not a scientific hypothesis, since the scientific method isn’t going to be able to detect a non-material cause… it’ll show up as an anomaly.) Even if we filled in that particular gap, there'd still be room for an intelligent designer. But once you’ve got a cell capable of DNA replication, evolution becomes something organisms do through well documented processes. I personally think that most of the arguments I’ve encountered in Intelligent Design (complexity, etc.) are best explained by the concept of emergence (but then, I tend to view gods themselves as emergent properties of a complex cosmos), and I think emergence has profound spiritual implications, but that’s a topic for the other blog.
7/20/16, 10:16 AM
onething said...
Well it is too0 late in teh day, but you said,
"I'm afraid if Milton is the best you have to offer, you don't have anything to offer. Not a single one of his major ideas or arguments is based on anything approaching an actual understanding of the science at hand. He does not comprehend the theories and data he attacks at even a high-school barely-passing level; or if he does, then he deliberately misrepresents them for a non-scientific audience (which is even worse).
Before you can seriously critique the fundamentals of any field, scientific or otherwise, you need to first UNDERSTAND them as they are understood by those who work in the field. Milton failed at this utterly."
I find this distressing because it is the same criticism that I have seen over and over again for years - those who critique Darwinism and find it wanting always go into very great and fascinating detail. The answer comes back that this person does not even have a high school level understanding, they are utterly confused about all aspects of the theory or are possibly even dishonest. And yet when I read these books and sometimes read the arguments back and forth, such as about the flagellum, it is almost always the case that the one criticizing Darwinism who I find much more credible and seem to be on a higher level of consideration. So I just wonder if you have actually read Milton's book? Or where did you come up with the idea that he understands nothing? And if it is so difficult to understand that even a person with a higher IQ than average is hopelessly unable to, why even teach it at all? Why teach it in high school? Why even teach it in college? People apparently cannot understand it.
John Roth,
Certainly I have never seen even a beginning of an argument regarding the very hard problem of irreducibly complex biological systems. At one time, I read everything I could about it. If you know where I can, I'd appreciate it.
7/20/16, 10:51 AM
Esn said...
Interesting New Yorker article! Of course, I was reading that and making my own conclusions... in no special order:
A) Most of the negative attributes Schwartz assigns to Trump (such as lack of principles, lying freely, nepotism and some sociopathy) seem to be just as true of Clinton. Exceptions are Trump's short attention span, & Trump craving publicity & admiration vs. Clinton hating publicity while craving power.
B) In terms of Trump being a risk to nuclear war, so far Clinton scares me much more on that front. Trump typically talks tough but negotiates to something more reasonable, while Clinton's lack of ability or desire to compromise has actually fomented chaos all across the world (in Syria, Libya, and Ukraine), and may be setting the stage for WW3. Putin has been trying to warn the West for years: http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/putin-loses-it-journalists-i-dont-know-how-get-through-you-people/ri15456
C) I'm sure Schwartz did interview for the article at least partly to get publicity, as Trump alleges. There are just too many instantly quotable and controversial "soundbites" in it for me to think that that article is an entirely intellectually honest warning from his heart. I've now added both "The Art of the Deal" and his subsequent book "What Really Matters" to my reading list, so I guess it worked.
D) He did somewhat lower my expectations of Trump, but not enough to make me think that Trump is preferable to Clinton (and it doesn't matter anyway, because as a Canadian, I'm not voting).
@Kevin Warner
Guilty as charged! Granny Weatherwax is my favourite of Pratchett's characters, and I've remembered that concept (of evil starting by treating people as things) ever since I first read it.
@Steve in Colorado
My philosophy on truth is basically:
1) no model can ever be fully accurate, because in order to be fully accurate, it would have to account for everything in the universe, which would make it as infinitely complex as the universe itself (it is impossible to "wall off" a section of the universe and describe just that with your model, because everything in the universe is linked in one way or another)
2) since all models are therefore approximations, it is even possible for two models to be contradictory in their implications and yet both be "true" (once I realized this, I began to understand some of the cryptic passages I'd come across from Buddhist sources)
3) practically speaking, models that are more wrong BUT faster and less resource-intensive to put in practice are very often preferable, because as humans we have neither infinite time nor infinite resources. This is especially so in smaller, poorer population centres.
4) one shouldn't worry too much about whether the mechanisms that any one model gives to explain itself are ACTUALLY TRUE (see point "1"). Just worry about whether it explains what you need it to well enough and that it is easy to use. Newton's "invisible gravitational forces" were considered to be the equivalent of New Age kookery in his day - no less strange than seeing the forests as being full of nature spirits. Whatever works for the task at hand is the right thing to use. Many quantum physicists have given up on explanations entirely, "so long as the math seems to work". Likewise, in my daily life, I often notice that A leads to B but am not sure exactly why - nor is it usually necessary to figure it out (although it does make it frustrating when trying to explain my reasons to other people).
7/20/16, 12:43 PM
Nestorian said...
You are just like Richard Dawkins when it comes to creationism - all insult and comparatively little argument. Your interest is not in reasoned conversation, but in fanatical shout-downs.
The likes of people such as yourself do not faze me. Despite what virtually the entire West - including, regrettably, much of organized Christianity - has communicated to its denizens for generations now, Young Earth Creationism is an intellectually robust and eminently defensible world view.
It took me years to get around the insult- and denunciation-fusillades that our society continually erects to discourage those who fancy themselves to be intellectually sophisticated from taking Young Earth Creationism seriously. But I am very, very glad that I finally did so nonetheless.
7/20/16, 2:06 PM
Stephanie Ladd said...
Anyways, thank you JMG for all you do. I've been working my way through your blog and books for the past 9 months or so and I can't get enough. Keep it coming!
SaLadd
7/20/16, 2:58 PM
rabtter said...
Hi Nestorian,
"There are tons of other books and articles as well, dealing in depth with all of the various scientific disciplines, but this is not the time or place to develop a comprehensive annotated biography. Suffice it to say that an abundance of resources can be found easily using internet search tools for those with the inclination to do so. That's how I myself did it, after all."
Well, I suppose you can. Check out http://www.talkorigins.org, lots of stuff there dealing with the authors you mention. If you only seek out sources that give comfort, then you aren't really looking for the truth.
7/20/16, 3:33 PM
Agent Provocateur said...
I've seen this same line of thought in some of my Christians friends. You can do as you like of course, but I'm a little concerned with this type of scriptural interpretation because I think it is too brittle. Prove one element not to be historical true and the whole edifice crumbles. Efforts to avoid this then leads to some rather desperate reasoning.
Stories in scripture need not all be understood as literal historical truth. One example will suffice. As a Christian you likely believe Jesus is the Son of God, the Word of God, and the Lamb of God. At some point, if you were forced to say what these three descriptions mean, metaphor would sneak in. It would be hard to maintain Jesus was/is literally a lamb, a word, or perhaps even a son. Something can be true (in terms of values) but not historical fact. And then again there are some things in the scriptures of the world that are perhaps neither. Such elements are then at least useful to provoke thought and encourage listening to one's heart.
A given scriptural story may be metaphorical, didactic, historical, historical fiction, folklore, epic, fable, parable, poetry, myth, prose, polemic, analogy, etc. ... perhaps more than one of these at any one time. Allowing non literal scriptural interpretation, often more than one at a time, has a long history in both Jewish and Christian thought. Its only as Christianity drifted westward into less literate (and so less sophisticated) societies that things got dumbed down. Allowing multiple (and not necessarily literal) interpretations allows a much greater depth and resilience to one's faith. It also helps avoid unnecessary conflict with scientific facts as they are commonly understood today.
I'm not trying to change your mind. But if someday you find the physical evidence of a very old earth too hard to ignore, I'm suggesting you need not drop your faith altogther.
7/20/16, 4:08 PM
Unknown said...
@esn--I have a comment about your philosophy on truth. Two comments actually. The first is that you wrote a clear, concise and logical set of statements about a big question.
My second point follows up on a question about Judaism that was asked earlier in the week. Your philosophy resembles how a lot of Jews who actively participate in Judaism as a religion think of Judaism. By "active participation" I mean any of the following: celebrating any Jewish holidays; observing Jewish rites of passage such as b'rit milah, Bar/Bat Mitzvah and marriage; belonging to a synagogue; giving consideration to Jewish values that are ultimately derived from the Torah as guides to behavior.
As a strictly monotheist religion since the return from the Babylonian Exile, Judaism has had severe problems with theodicy. The doctrine of the Chosen People, central to claims for the divine authority of the Law, embodies a host of faith-based assertions which are unconvincing to any modern person who has had a liberal education. Nevertheless, scientists and engineers, people who are atheists or lean that way or just don't think about it very much, and people who haven't had personal experiences of antisemitism give their children Jewish educations and in some cases become cantors or rabbis or religious educators--because some of it seems to be true, and it works pretty well for the task at hand, which is living as a decent person and supporting decent values and behavior in society at large. I gather that this outlook is fairly common among adherents of mainline Protestant denominations too. It is something that people who like their belief systems cut and dried don't seem to get.
7/20/16, 4:09 PM
John Roth said...
Cro-Magnon is an obsolete name for humans who lived in Europe after the demise of the Neanderthals and about 10,000 years ago. They were anatomically modern humans. The variety of human with bigger brains was Neanderthals. There's a lot of obsolete information out there; ancient DNA research is clarifying the relationships wonderfully.
@heather
Yeah, generally short adjectives and adverbs take the -er and -est suffixes, longer ones take more and most, or less and least. Of course there are exceptions. This is English we’re talking about.
@Scotlyn
Time is long. Most people don’t get how long; there’s lots of room in there for things we have absolutely no inkling of to have happened as support for what we see now.
The mitochondria story has never made sense to me, for one simple reason. Most of the genes that are needed to support mitochondria are in the cell nucleus; only some of those seem to be clearly bacterial in origin. Where did the rest come from? One answer has turned up recently: an archaea which has a primitive version of organelles and the supporting mechanisms. That makes more sense - the more of the supporting structure that’s there already, the less strange the story that says an archaeon swallowed a bacterium and then they settled their differences.
@onething
Maybe this bit of my personal history will help clarify things. Some time ago I ran across a book titled “The Aquatic Ape,” where the author explained a lot of the differences between humans and great apes by analogy with the whales and dolphins, and proposed that our ancestors had spent a period of time in the sea so those adaptations could occur. With what I knew then, she was quite convincing.
It took me learning a great deal about paleoanthropology and the actual evidence, both fossil and anatomical, to see the gaping holes in her logic. This didn’t happen by reading a book or a blog post or two. It took a couple of years of poking at this and that until I finally came to a conclusion.
When someone says: “you don’t understand the science,” the subtext is “you don’t seem willing to learn, and I have no interest in arguing with you.” People can always find “anomalies” in anything. If you want, you can generate enough “anomalies” to tax the patience of a saint. I tend to call this “argument by tsunami,” and all it does is make me want to write off the arguer as someone who’s more interested in winning, fair means or foul, rather than engaging in a joint effort to find the truth.
“Irreducible complexity” is not a hard problem. It’s an example of “petite principo” or assuming the conclusion, known in philosophy and law as “begging the question.” Pointing at something and saying “that’s irreducibly complex,” isn’t convincing without a solid, experimentally verifiable explanation of exactly why it’s irreducibly complex.
@Esn
On models. I recently came across the distinction between “functional” models and “mechanistic” models. The latter use real pieces with known characteristics and known interactions. Are they simplifications? Of course. Functional models, on the other hand, simply invent parts that act the way the modeler thinks they ought to act.
This may make a bit more sense.
7/20/16, 5:12 PM
Emmanuel Goldstein said...
"Thanks be to God!" cried the priest, "God has preserved my life!"
The executioner let him go.
The lawyer was next. Once again, the blade did not budge.
"You have to set ME free too!" said the lawyer. "If you try again, it's double jeopardy and therefore illegal."
Grumbling, they set the lawyer free too.
The engineer was last. Once again, they pulled the rope and the blade did not move.
As they were untying the engineer and preparing to set him free, the engineer looked up at the Guillotine and said,
"There's a little piece of wood stuck up there. Hey, I think I can fix that..."
7/20/16, 6:12 PM
Myriad said...
There are systems in the world that can both generate and preserve persistent complex patterns, a type of behavior only recently recognized as possible. These systems include the functioning of brains, certain iterative processes arising in pure mathematics, and the behavior of computing machines when programmed in certain ways. The other, and foremost in some ways, example is biological evolution.
Even after these processes were known to exist, their creative power was not recognized at first. For instance, well after the process of evolution was roughly understood, some philosophers still claimed that there must be some occult force ("élan vital") separate from evolution itself driving evolution toward more complex forms. Analogously, a great majority of people still believe that there must be some supernatural phenomenon separate from the human brain that makes us conscious.
What I find particularly interesting is that all of those systems also have deep similarities in how they work internally. They are all composed of a large number of interconnected units with their own states, and in all cases the units integrate multiple inputs to change their states in a manner exhibiting sharp changes at a threshold. The logic gates in a computer resolve two or more inputs into a single 1 or 0 output. Brains consist of neurons interconnected via axons and dendrites, each with their own states, integrating the inputs of excitatory and inhibitory synapses against a threshold to fire or not fire moment by moment. (In number theory, the threshold behavior is a bit more abstract, but it's always implicitly present in operations that generate complex patterns. For example, various operations such as addition can combine multiple integers into a single result, but that result is either prime or not, an all-or-nothing threshold of sorts.)
There's a sharp all-or-nothing threshold at the heart of evolution as well. An organism's genome, after very complex interaction with the environment and other organisms, either contributes directly to the genomes of offspring or it does not. That process, going on simultaneously among trillions of genomes (each of them vastly complex themselves) throughout the earth's biosphere, has unimaginably vast computational power.
Computational power alone doesn't imply intelligence, although as far as we know it's a prerequisite for intelligence. But when you see computational power put into effect to generate novel forms that effectively solve complex problems (chiefly, in this case, the ever-changing problem of ongoing survival in the environment), why not call it intelligent? Unless, like Turing, you withhold that designation until it talks to you in your own language.
I can't say whether or not that intelligence experiences, understands, wills, plans, or feels, but it's likely that it remembers (the collective genome is a—I keep using this word—vast memory store), and obvious that it creates.
7/20/16, 7:24 PM
patriciaormsby said...
Being a lady, too, has its disadvantages. Politics is a shark-infested pond, and if anyone shows weakness, they get eaten alive, so it would be harder for her as a woman to step back from the kamikaze course she has embarked on. (I watched a Japanese TV drama/documentary last year on a woman who ruled China a century or so ago, with a truly terrifying reputation, and she said, "Oh God, this is not a position for a woman!" for this very reason.) Thus I and a lot of other people, Vladimir Putin included, fear that a new Clinton presidency could lead to a nuclear war. This is why just about everyone who's paying attention to eastern Europe seems to like Trump. There are people in America saying America could win such a war.
Does anyone really want to see if we can? The results are not something we can mitigate or turn back from.
7/20/16, 7:43 PM
Nestorian said...
"If you only seek out sources that give comfort, then you aren't really looking for the truth."
Yes, and that applies to evolutionists just as much as it does to creationists.
7/21/16, 4:42 AM
zerowastemillennial said...
As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable. Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you. The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer programmer sometimes enjoyable. But as anyone who’s worked with tech people knows, this intellectual background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence.
7/21/16, 9:40 AM
Steve in Colorado said...
Yes, agreed.
@Emmanuel Goldstein
The version of that joke I am familiar with adds something. Basically all three convicts chose to face upwards, in a sign of defiance and their innocence. The first two walk away free, since if the blade failed to kill you it was a sign of you're not being guilty (yeah right). The engineer faces up too, but before they can pull the rope he blurts out, "Hey I see the problem..."
Adds a particularly nerdy twist to the engineer's mentality.
7/21/16, 3:37 PM
Nik said...
This statement rings so true to me. I'm a student working in a prestigious research lab, and I can attest that 90% of the papers in my (relatively small) field have hidden motivations. The authors are pushing a particular view, being paid by some company or other, or just looking to get tenure.
7/24/16, 7:29 PM