Group items tagged

My doughty, authoritative criticisms (here and here) seem to have just about brought the blogosphere to its knees. Looking over some of the responses, I'd have to say that a lot of people either help make my point or miss it altogether. You can look here, here, here, and here for some of the smarter responses. They fall into a few categories.

"Schmitt's basic idea, in the Theology, is that any normal constitutional order of "sovereignty" presupposes the abnormal, the exception, and the right to decide when that condition exists. Beyond the norm and the normal, then, there is no super-norm that informs all the others; there is only the lurking decision about the exception of existential emergency. That "space" becomes the overdeterminant of sovereignty. What makes this "theological" in a hidden way is that (i) actual historical developments turned Christian/religious notions into secularized concepts of the state; and (ii) those concepts, by analogy, include the premise of the miracle, here turned into the "exception." Deism and liberalism eventually banished both God and the miracle from the proceedings, creating an agreeable façade of order, normality, rationality, science, legitimacy, and civilized conversation amongst those of requisite, recognized competence. The transcendent power is bracketed, the immanent will of the people or nation becomes constitutive."

"By cutting off federal funding for research and stymieing data collection and sharing, the National Rifle Association has tried to do to the study of gun violence what climate deniers have done to the science of global warming. No wonder: When it comes to hard numbers, some of the gun lobby's favorite arguments are full of holes."

"I could write a book refuting the nonsense regularly expounded by New York Time's columnist Stanley Fish. Oh, wait, I almost have written a book about it! I already commented on this blog regarding Stanley's thoughts concerning academic freedom, deconstructionism, and the New Atheism (part 1 and part 2). I was going to leave Fish alone for a while, but today three friends independently sent me his latest column and asked me to write about it, so here we go, again..."

"H. sapiens evolved about 200 thousand years ago. So we're pretty early in our species life cycle. I know we like to think of ourselves as special creatures, and to be fair it does seem like we are the only superintelligent life that's ever existed on Earth. But it's worth keeping in mind that despite all our accomplishments, like electric blankets and cities and videogames, that we are still part of a species whose lifespan is measured in tens of thousands of years."

"The most detailed map ever created of the cosmic microwave background - the relic radiation from the Big Bang - acquired by ESA's Planck space telescope, has been released, revealing features that challenge the foundations of our current understanding of the Universe and may require new physics."

"There are many fallacies that undergird alternative medicine, which evolved into "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), and for which the preferred term among its advocates is now "integrative medicine," meant to imply the "best of both worlds.""

"While President Xi Jinping gives the keynote speech at this weekend's Boao Forum on the Chinese island of Hainan, attended also by business icons like Bill Gates and George Soros, one friend of China will not be there -- North Korea's Kim Jong Un, now pondering his next move in the escalating threats uttered from Pyongyang."

"So... we'd already taken a stab at debunking Jaron Lanier's "gobbledygook economics" a few weeks back when it started appearing, but since then there's been more Lanier everywhere (obviously, in coordination with his book release), and each time it seems more ridiculous than the last. Each time, the focus is on the following economically ridiculous concepts: (1) there should be micropayments for anyone doing anything free online because someone benefits somewhere (2) modern efficiency via technology has destroyed the middle class. Both of these claims make no sense at all. "

"Mark Kleiman, a public policy professor at the University of California-Los Angeles who has studied promising methods of controlling crime, suggests that because criminologists are basically sociologists, they look for sociological explanations, not medical ones. My own sense is that interest groups probably play a crucial role: Political conservatives want to blame the social upheaval of the '60s for the rise in crime that followed. Police unions have reasons for crediting its decline to an increase in the number of cops. Prison guards like the idea that increased incarceration is the answer. Drug warriors want the story to be about drug policy. If the actual answer turns out to be lead poisoning, they all lose a big pillar of support for their pet issue. And while lead abatement could be big business for contractors and builders, for some reason their trade groups have never taken it seriously."

"American biology research achieved greatness because we encouraged individual scientists to pursue the questions that intrigued them and the NIH, NSF and other agencies gave them the resources to do so. And ENCODE and projects like it are, ostensibly at least, meant to continue this tradition, empowering individual scientists by producing datasets of "higher quality and greater comprehensiveness than would otherwise emerge from the combined output of individual research projects"."

"If getting active and staying healthy were easy, everyone would do it...but we don't. We come home after a long day of sitting in a chair to de-stress by sitting in another chair, unable to summon the energy to take a walk or hit the gym. Sure, everyone says to "make time for what's important to you," but oversimplification doesn't make the struggle easier. Let's break down the mental walls keeping you from taking care of yourself."

"And the amazing thing is that the game gets me to feel all those emotions too. I'm glad that the game comes in monthly installments, because I need the time between episodes to recover. But why is that? By what psychological, neurological, and biological mechanisms do video games like The Walking Dead get us to not only empathize with characters onscreen, but also share their emotions?"

"Bruce Hood, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, picks up where Woolf and the modernists left off. In his excellent new book, The Self Illusion, he seeks to understand how the singularity of the self emerges from the cacophony of mind and the mess of social life. Dr. Hood was kind enough to answer a few of my questions below:" This whole thing is like one long advertisement for why tabula rasa adherents (ie: Ayn Rand) are highly uncritical.

"McDonald's Corp. MCD +0.32% customers will have an easier time of it next week, when the burger giant's restaurant and drive-thru menu boards across the country will show that the Big Mac, at 550 calories, is 200 calories leaner than the other burger. But other choices won't be so clear-cut, like the Double Cheeseburger with 440 calories or the Southwest Salad with Crispy Chicken, which weighs in at 450. McDonald's highest-calorie item isn't a burger at all, but the 1,150-calorie Big breakfast with hotcakes and large biscuit. And the healthy-sounding 22-ounce mango pineapple smoothie matches the 350 calories in the grilled chicken sandwich."

In our analysis of the Freakonomics approach, we encountered a range of avoidable mistakes, from back-of-the-envelope analyses gone wrong to unexamined assumptions to an uncritical reliance on the work of Levitt's friends and colleagues. This turns accessibility on its head: Readers must work to discern which conclusions are fully quantitative, which are somewhat data driven and which are purely speculative.

"It's been just over twenty-five years since Prozac came to market, and more than twenty per cent of Americans now regularly take mind-altering drugs prescribed by their doctors. Almost as familiar as brands like Zoloft and Lexapro is the worry about what it means that the daily routine in many households, for parents and children alike, includes a dose of medications that are poorly understood and whose long-term effects on the body are unknown. "

"I teach Criminal Justice in a rural and predominantly White state. One of the difficulties teaching my discipline in this environment is that I am mainly discussing urban problems in a place where the nearest large city is several hours and an entire state away. Many of my students only know about crime and urban America from what their family, cable news and AM radio tell them."

"The United States routinely spends more tax dollars per high-school athlete than per high-school math student-unlike most countries worldwide. And we wonder why we lag in international education rankings?"

Awesome read. The whole sports thing is bizarre, at K-12 or college level. Such a distraction, such a distortion of resources & effort.

It's *such* a distraction, but - dear god - don't even mention that you are entertaining such a notion, even in my ultra-liberal Seattle neighborhood. It's worst than being a baby-killer. Sports are apparantly important because of... reasons. And I though right-wing Christians were the most likely to embrace blind faith in something.

"Have you ever watched the excavation that precedes a tall building? It seems to take forever. Then, when the digging is finally done, construction rockets upward in no time. For the past few months, I've been watching a crew excavate the site of a new condo tower on Seattle's First Hill. It's on a route I walk three times a week, so I've had a ringside seat. And here's the thing that finally dawned on me, after years of not really thinking about these holes in the urban ground: What's all the excavation for?"