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anonymous

Welcome to Peak Capitalism - 0 views

www.macrofugue.com/welcome-to-peak-capitalism

shared by anonymous on 05 Mar 13 - Cached
  • Let’s back pause a minute to define what this means:  Capitalism is the system of relationships between the labour class and the capital class.
  • Individual relationships are really bilateral.  There are two channels:  the wage channel, whereby the capitalist negotiates with the worker for the highest output at the lowest salary, and the price channel, whereby capitalists compete with one another to provide the highest quality products and services for the worker at the lowest prices.
  • This system provides a unique suite of incentives to each class which is responsible for providing the West a previously unimaginably high standard of living, even for the lower classes.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  •  The worker is incentivised to produce more and higher quality goods, thereby increasing his advantage in competing with other labour for higher wages.
  • The capitalist is incentivised to produce higher quality goods at lower prices, thereby increasing her advantage in competing with other companies for sales, and ultimately the capital she can accumulate.
  • The character of change now represents a shift, not from labour to capital, but away from the classical capitalist bilateral relationship between the labour class and the capital class (through wages and prices) to a unilateral one (prices).
  • Thus we get to the fundamental reality:  capitalists have been compensated for serving the poor and the elderly.  The system has worked for everyone.  The government has brokered a deal whereby capitalists accumulate capital by providing the infirm and the retired working class sustenance.  Perhaps you would change the proportions of profit and transfer payments, but the basic system of transactions and incentives has been proved out.
  • When the worker retires, the government subsidises his means of sustenance by crediting new deposits to his bank account.  He uses these credits to purchase sustenance from the capitalist class.  The retired worker has already pre-paid for these newly government-created deposits with the massive productivity gains throughout his career.  As long as the retired worker, and the present labour force, are able to increase productivity at a rate faster than the retiree’s new deposits are created by the government, the capitalist gets paid, her worker is employed, and the retired worker is provided sustenance.
  • At the most basic level, the worker does not pre-pay his retirement through social security and pension fund contributions, but even more so by productivity.
  • The enemy of both capital and labour in the system of capitalism is running out of new markets.
  • Capitalist income has long since maximised consumption, and is now focused on maximising capital accumulation.
  • Since capitalist’s goal is to accumulate more capital, she is going to re-invest when she sees opportunity, and this free cash-flow is exchanged with new labour for more future production.
  • But what happens when the capitalist sees her opportunity set decline?  Her expectation that the payment she makes to the new workers she’d hire would materialise into higher revenue later diminishes, and she decides to book her profit as cash.
  • Who could blame her?  She isn’t going to operate at an anticipated loss.
  • We have previously observed that these variations in investment horizon — and consequently rate of investment — are responsible for most of the economic cyclical variations.
  • The second is a glut of capital relative to the population.  There appear to be two chief reasons for this:  a rapid expansion in technology-driven productivity and demographically-driven declining final sales growth.
  • The way to mitigate the transition pain from capitalism to rentierism is to have the government pay retired workers for years of uncompensated productivity gains.
  • The principal political driving force away from bilateral capitalism to trilateral government-brokered rentierism will, perhaps ironically, be the same force that is trying desperately (and likely with futility) to hang on to more capitalist relationships:  baby boomers.  But even the conservative baby boomers will move to ensure their entitlements are maintained, for they will need more than they anticipated as a result of the 2008 crisis.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 05 Mar 13
       
      This is a fascinating departure from the usual line that Baby Boomers are simply milking capitalist relationships. The suggestion that even *they* will be negatively affected by the economic downturn offers some perverse hope (for me) that a 'shared sense of sacrifice' might actually be possible.
  • We have been shifting at the margins away from bilateral capitalist relationships for decades.  What replaced it has successfully navigated the needs and demands of each class – accumulation to capital for enterprise value, sustenance to workers for labour and sustenance to the retiree for decades of productivity growth.
  • anonymous on 05 Mar 13
     
    "Has the United States of America reached, and perhaps passed, "peak capitalism" - the point where the maximum number of people participate in capitalist relationships? The argument could be made, at least on a relative basis, that it has indeed crested, and we are on the slow, inevitable march away."
anonymous

Science-Based Medicine » It's a part of my paleo fantasy, it's a part of my paleo dream - 0 views

www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/...y-its-a-part-of-my-paleo-dream

shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 13 - Cached
  • If I had to pick one fallacy that rules above all among proponents of CAM/IM, it would have to be either the naturalistic fallacy (i.e., that if it’s natural—whatever that means—it must be better) or the fallacy of antiquity (i.e., that if it’s really old, it must be better).
  • Basically, it’s a rejection of modernity, and from it flow the interest in herbalism, various religious practices rebranded as treatments
  • there is a definite belief underlying much of CAM that technology and pharmaceuticals are automatically bad and that “natural” must be better.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • it’s hard not to note that cancer and heart disease are primarily diseases of aging, and life expectancy was so much lower back in the day that a much smaller percentage of the population lived to advanced ages than is the case today.
  • Even so, an implicit assumption among many CAM advocates is that cardiovascular disease is largely a disease of modern lifestyle and diet and that, if modern humans could somehow mimic preindustrial or, according to some, even preagricultural, lifestyles, that cardiovascular disease could be avoided.
  • Over the last decade, Cordain has become the most prominent promoter of the so-called “Paleo diet,” having written The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Foods You Were Designed to Eat and multiple other books advocating a paleolithic-mimetic diet as the cure for what ails modern humans.
  • But how does one determine what the prevalence of cardiovascular disease was in the ancient past?
  • there have been indications that the idea that ancient humans didn’t suffer from atherosclerosis is a comforting myth, the most recent of which is a study published a week ago online in The Lancet by Prof. Randall C. Thompson of Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute and an international team of investigators entitled Atherosclerosis across 4000 years of human history: the Horus study of four ancient populations.
  • Basically, it was a study of 137 different mummies from four different geographic locations spanning 4,000 years.
  • So, although there was a fair amount of evidence from studies of Egyptian mummies that atherosclerosis was not uncommon, in Egypt it was mainly the wealthy and powerful who were mummified after their deaths. Conceivably, they could have lived a very different lifestyle and consumed a very different diet than the average Egyptian living around that time.
  • So the authors obtained whole-body CT scans of the 137 mummies, either pre-existing scans or scans prospectively done, and analyzed them for calcifications.
  • The mummies to be included in the study were chosen primarily based on two factors, being in a good state of preservation with identifiable vascular tissue, and being adults.
  • The authors obtained identifying information from an extensive search of museum and other databases by a team of archeologists and experts in mummy restoration, and sex was determined by either analysis of the genitals and reproductive organs when present and by pelvic morphology when they were not present.
  • Age was estimated by standard analysis of architectural changes in the clavicle, femur, and humerus.
  • Finally, multiple anthropological and archeological sources were used in an attempt to estimate likely risk factors for the mummies.
  • Figure 2 summarizes the findings nicely: There’s also this video featured in a Nature report on the study showing the reconstructed scan of one of the mummies with atherosclerotic plaques in the coronary arteries.
  • As expected, more atherosclerosis correlates with advanced age, and the amount of atherosclerosis in the young and middle-aged (although the times in which the people who became these mummies after death lived age 50 was old) was less.
  • Although the sample number was far too small to draw definitive conclusions (as is often the case in archeological research), the prevalence of atherosclerotic disease in these mummies did not appear to correlate with the cultures in which the mummies lived.
  • As is noted in Thompson’s article, ancient Egyptians and Peruvians were agricultural cultures with farms and domesticated animals, Ancestral Puebloans were forager-farmers, and the Unangans were hunter-gatherers without agriculture. Indeed, the Peruvians and Ancestral Puebloans predated the written word and were thus prehistoric cultures.
  • One notes that no one, including the authors of this study, is saying that lifestyle and diet are not important factors for the development of atherosclerotic heart disease.
  • What they are saying is that atherosclerosis appears to be associated with aging and that the claims that mimicking paleolithic diets (which, one notes, were definitely not vegan) are overblown. In other words, there is a certain inherent risk of atherosclerosis that is related to aging that is likely not possible to lower further
  • I actually think that the authors probably went too far with that last statement in that, while they might be correct that atherosclerosis is an inherent component of human aging, it is quite well established that this inherent component of aging can at least be worsened by sedentary lifestyle and probably certain diets.
  • One notes that, although the Paleo Diet is not, strictly speaking, always sold as CAM/IM, the ideas behind it are popular among CAM advocates, and the diet is frequently included as part of “integrative medicine,” for example, here at the University of Connecticut website, where it’s under integrative nutrition.
  • In particular, the appeal to ancient wisdom and ancient civilizations as yet untouched by the evil of modernity is the same sort of arguments that are made in favor of various CAM modalities ranging from herbalism to vegan diets rebranded as being somehow CAM to the appeal to “natural” cures.
  • Indeed, the fetish for the “natural” in CAM is such that even a treatment like Stanislaw Burzynski’s antineoplaston therapy is represented as “natural” when in fact, if it were ever shown to work against cancer, it would be chemotherapy and has toxicities greater than that of some of our current chemotherapy drugs.
  • The book is by Marlene Zuk and entitled Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us About Sex, Diet, and How We Live. Zuk is an evolutionary biologist, and in particular she points out how the evolutionary arguments favored by advocates of the Paleo diet don’t stand up to scrutiny.
  • The interview begins with Zuk confronting Cordain at a conference on evolution and diseases of modern environments. At his lecture, Cordain pronounced several foods to be the cause of fatal conditions in people carrying certain genes.
  • These foods included, predictably, cultivated foods such as bread (made from grain), rice, and potatoes. Zuk couldn’t resist asking a question, namely why the inability to digest so many common foods would persist in the population, observing, “Surely it would have been selected out of the population.” Cordain’s response? That humans had not had time to adapt to these foods, to which Zuk retorted, “Plenty of time.” Apparently, in her book, Zuk produces numerous examples of evolution in humans occurring in a time frame of less than 10,000 years, including:
  • Blue eyes arose 6,000 to 10,000 years ago
  • Rapid selection for the CCR5-D gene variant that makes some people immune to HIV
  • Lactase persistence (production past the age of weening of the lactase enzyme that digests lactose in milk) probably dates back only around 7,500 to 10,000 years, around the time that cattle were domesticated
  • there is no one diet or climate that predominated among our Paleolithic ancestors:
  • Zuk detects an unspoken, barely formed assumption that humanity essentially stopped evolving in the Stone Age and that our bodies are “stuck” in a state that was perfectly adapted to survive in the paleolithic environment. Sometimes you hear that the intervention of “culture” has halted the process of natural selection. This, “Paleofantasy” points out, flies in the face of facts. Living things are always and continuously in the process of adapting to the changing conditions of their environment, and the emergence of lactase persistence indicates that culture (in this case, the practice of keeping livestock for meat and hides) simply becomes another one of those conditions.
  • For this reason, generalizations about the typical hunter-gatherer lifestyle are spurious; it doesn’t exist. With respect to what people ate (especially how much meat), the only safe assumption was “whatever they could get,” something that to this day varies greatly depending on where they live. Recently, researchers discovered evidence that people in Europe were grinding and cooking grain (a paleo-diet bugaboo) as far back as 30,000 years ago, even if they weren’t actually cultivating it. “A strong body of evidence,” Zuk writes, “points to many changes in our genome since humans spread across the planet and developed agriculture, making it difficult at best to point to a single way of eating to which we were, and remain, best suited.”
  • Oh, and, as Zuk tells us, paleolithic people got cancer, too.
  • we humans have long been known to abuse and despoil our environment, even back in those “paleo” days. Indeed, when I took a prehistoric archeology course, which was largely dedicated to the period of time of the hunter-gatherers, one thing I remember my professor pointing out, and that was that what he did was largely the study of prehistoric garbage and that humans have always produced a lot of it.
  • anonymous on 22 Mar 13
     
    "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.""
anonymous

Looking for America - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...llins-looking-for-america.html

shared by anonymous on 15 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 15 Dec 12
     
    We will undoubtedly have arguments about whether tougher regulation on gun sales or extra bullet capacity would have made a difference in Connecticut. In a way it doesn't matter. America needs to tackle gun violence because we need to redefine who we are. We have come to regard ourselves - and the world has come to regard us - as a country that's so gun happy that the right to traffic freely in the most obscene quantities of weapons is regarded as far more precious than an American's right to health care or a good education.
anonymous

The new president of the Cato Institute wants the think tank to adopt the personal philosophy of Ayn Rand as policy. - 0 views

www.slate.com/...yn_rand_as_policy_.single.html

shared by anonymous on 13 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Zey, the other live tweeter, wrote that Allison would “oust out elements in Cato that disrespect Rand and JA's philosophy.” Pearson continued: Allison “expects challenges in the area of reforming foreign policy there but seems to look forward to the challenge.”
  • anonymous on 13 Sep 12
     
    "Objectivists don't see foreign policy that way. The Ayn Rand Institute, founded in 1985 by Rand's intellectual/financial heir Leonard Peikoff, has spun off arguments for war rooted in a philosophy of self-preservation. Shortly after 9/11, the man who'd inherited a movement and $750,000 from Rand published "End States Who Sponsor Terrorism," whose title summed it up. "The choice today is mass death in the United States or mass death in the terrorist nations," wrote Peikoff. "The greatest obstacle to U.S. victory is not Iran and its allies, but our own intellectuals.""
anonymous

Freakonomics: What Went Wrong? - 0 views

www.americanscientist.org/...issue.aspx

shared by anonymous on 13 Dec 11 - Cached
  • Oster’s work stirred debate for a few years in the epidemiological literature, but eventually she admitted that the subject-matter experts had been right all along. One of Das Gupta’s many convincing counterpoints was a graph showing that in Taiwan, the ratio of boys to girls was near the natural rate for first and second babies (106:100) but not for third babies (112:100); this pattern held up with or without hepatitis B. In a follow-up blog post, Levitt applauded Oster for bravery in admitting her mistake, but he never credited Das Gupta for her superior work. Our point is not that Das Gupta had to be right and Oster wrong, but that Levitt and Dubner, in their celebration of economics and economists, suspended their critical thinking.
  • In SuperFreakonomics, Levitt and Dubner use a back-of-the-envelope calculation to make the contrarian claim that driving drunk is safer than walking drunk, an oversimplified argument that was picked apart by bloggers. The problem with this argument, and others like it, lies in the assumption that the driver and the walker are the same type of person, making the same kinds of choices, except for their choice of transportation.
  • Such all-else-equal thinking is a common statistical fallacy. In fact, driver and walker are likely to differ in many ways other than their mode of travel. What seem like natural calculations are stymied by the impracticality, in real life, of changing one variable while leaving all other variables constant.
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  • This unavoidable tradeoff between false positive and false negative errors is a well-known property of all statistical-prediction applications. Circling back to check all the factors involved in the problem might have helped the authors avoid this mistake.
  • How could an experienced journalist and a widely respected researcher slip up in so many ways? Some possible answers to this question offer insights for the would-be pop-statistics writer.
  • Leave friendship at the door: We attribute many of these errors to the structure of the authors’ collaboration, which, from what we can tell, relies on an informal social network that has many potential failure points.
  • Don’t sell yourself short: Perhaps Levitt’s admirable modesty—he has repeatedly attributed his success to luck and hard work rather than genius—has led him astray. If he feels he is surrounded by economists more exceptional and brilliant than he is, he may let their assertions stand without challenge.
  • Maintain checks and balances: A solid collaboration requires each side to check and balance the other side. Although there’s no way we can be sure, perhaps, in some of the cases described above, there was a breakdown in the division of labor when it came to investigating technical points.
  • Take your time: Success comes at a cost: The constraints of producing continuous content for a blog or website and meeting publisher’s deadlines may have adverse effects on accuracy.
  • Be clear about where you’re coming from: Levitt’s publishers, along with Dubner, characterize him as a “rogue economist.”
  • Use latitude responsibly: When a statistician criticizes a claim on technical grounds, he or she is declaring not that the original finding is wrong but that it has not been convincingly proven. Researchers—even economists endorsed by Steven Levitt—can make mistakes. It may be okay to overlook the occasional mistake in the pursuit of the larger goal of understanding the world. But once one accepts this lower standard—science as plausible stories or data-supported reasoning, rather than the more carefully tested demonstrations that are characteristic of Levitt’s peer-reviewed research articles—one really has to take extra care, consider all sides of an issue, and look out for false positive results.
  • anonymous on 13 Dec 11
     
    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.
anonymous

Remarkable Editorial Bias on Climate Science at the Wall Street Journal - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...nce-at-the-wall-street-journal

shared by anonymous on 29 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • the most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal in this field is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable (but scientifically accurate) essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down.
  • anonymous on 29 Jan 12
     
    The Wall Street Journal's editorial board has long been understood to be not only antagonistic to the facts of climate science, but hostile. But in a remarkable example of their unabashed bias, on Friday they published an opinion piece that not only repeats many of the flawed and misleading arguments about climate science, but purports to be of special significance because it was signed by 16 "scientists."
anonymous

Two incontrovertible things: Anthropogenic Global Warming is Real, and the Wall Street Journal is Political Rag - 0 views

scienceblogs.com/...incontrovertible_things_an.php

shared by anonymous on 29 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • That second list of scientists, much longer than the first, is attached to a letter about the shoddy and ignorant ways in which science is being treated by the press and by climate change denialists. That letter was sent to the Wall Street Journal but rejected. The letter was later published in Science.
  • anonymous on 29 Jan 12
     
    The Wall Street Journal has published one of the most offensive, untruthful, twisted reviews of what scientists think of climate change; the WSJ Lies about the facts and twists the story to accommodate the needs of head-in-the-sand industrialists and 1%ers; The most compelling part of their argument, according to them, is that the editorial has been signed by 16 scientists.
anonymous

U.S. Defense Policy in the Wake of the Ukrainian Affair - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...e-policy-wake-ukrainian-affair

shared by anonymous on 08 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • There was a profoundly radical idea embedded in this line of thought. Wars between nations or dynastic powers had been a constant condition in Europe, and the rest of the world had been no less violent. Every century had had systemic wars in which the entire international system (increasingly dominated by Europe since the 16th century) had participated. In the 20th century, there were the two World Wars, in the 19th century the Napoleonic Wars, in the 18th century the Seven Years' War, and in the 17th century the Thirty Years' War.
  • Those who argued that U.S. defense policy had to shift its focus away from peer-to-peer and systemic conflict were in effect arguing that the world had entered a new era in which what had been previously commonplace would now be rare or nonexistent.
  • The radical nature of this argument was rarely recognized by those who made it, and the evolving American defense policy that followed this reasoning was rarely seen as inappropriate.
  • ...47 more annotations...
  • There were two reasons for this argument.
  • Military planners are always obsessed with the war they are fighting. It is only human to see the immediate task as a permanent task.
  • That generals always fight the last war must be amended to say that generals always believe the war they are fighting is the permanent war.
  • The second reason was that no nation-state was in a position to challenge the United States militarily.
  • After the Cold War ended, the United States was in a singularly powerful position. The United States remains in a powerful position, but over time, other nations will increase their power, form alliances and coalitions and challenge the United States.
  • No matter how benign a leading power is -- and the United States is not uniquely benign -- other nations will fear it, resent it or want to shame it for its behavior.
  • The idea that other nation-states will not challenge the United States seemed plausible for the past 20 years, but the fact is that nations will pursue interests that are opposed to American interest and by definition, pose a peer-to-peer challenge. The United States is potentially overwhelmingly powerful, but that does not make it omnipotent. 
  • It must also be remembered that asymmetric warfare and operations other than war always existed between and during peer-to-peer wars and systemic wars.
  • Asymmetric wars and operations other than war are far more common than peer-to-peer and systemic wars.
  • They can appear overwhelmingly important at the time. But just as the defeat of Britain by the Americans did not destroy British power, the outcomes of asymmetric wars rarely define long-term national power and hardly ever define the international system.
  • Asymmetric warfare is not a new style of war; it is a permanent dimension of warfare.
  • Peer-to-peer and systemic wars are also constant features but are far less frequent. They are also far more important.
  • There are a lot more asymmetric wars, but a defeat does not shift national power. If you lose a systemic war, the outcome can be catastrophic. 
  • A military force can be shaped to fight frequent, less important engagements or rare but critical wars -- ideally, it should be able to do both. But in military planning, not all wars are equally important.
  • Military leaders and defense officials, obsessed with the moment, must bear in mind that the war currently being fought may be little remembered, the peace that is currently at hand is rarely permanent, and harboring the belief that any type of warfare has become obsolete is likely to be in error.
  • Ukraine drove this lesson home. There will be no war between the United States and Russia over Ukraine. The United States does not have interests there that justify a war, and neither country is in a position militarily to fight a war. The Americans are not deployed for war, and the Russians are not ready to fight the United States.
  • But the events in Ukraine point to some realities.
  • First, the power of countries shifts, and the Russians had substantially increased their military capabilities since the 1990s.
  • Second, the divergent interests between the two countries, which seemed to disappear in the 1990s, re-emerged.
  • Third, this episode will cause each side to reconsider its military strategy and capabilities, and future crises might well lead to conventional war, nuclear weapons notwithstanding.
  • Ukraine reminds us that peer-to-peer conflict is not inconceivable, and that a strategy and defense policy built on the assumption has little basis in reality. The human condition did not transform itself because of an interregnum in which the United States could not be challenged; the last two decades are an exception to the rule of global affairs defined by war.
  • U.S. national strategy must be founded on the control of the sea. The oceans protect the United States from everything but terrorism and nuclear missiles.
  • The greatest challenge to U.S. control of the sea is hostile fleets. The best way to defeat hostile fleets is to prevent them from being built. The best way to do that is to maintain the balance of power in Eurasia. The ideal path for this is to ensure continued tensions within Eurasia so that resources are spent defending against land threats rather than building fleets. Given the inherent tensions in Eurasia, the United States needs to do nothing in most cases. In some cases it must send military or economic aid to one side or both. In other cases, it advises. 
  • The main goal here is to avoid the emergence of a regional hegemon fully secure against land threats and with the economic power to challenge the United States at sea.
  • The U.S. strategy in World War I was to refuse to become involved until it appeared, with the abdication of the czar and increasing German aggression at sea, that the British and French might be defeated or the sea-lanes closed.
  • At that point, the United States intervened to block German hegemony. In World War II, the United States remained out of the war until after the French collapsed and it appeared the Soviet Union would collapse -- until it seemed something had to be done.
  • Even then, it was only after Hitler's declaration of war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that Congress approved Roosevelt's plan to intervene militarily in continental Europe.
  • And in spite of operations in the Mediterranean, the main U.S. thrust didn't occur until 1944 in Normandy, after the German army had been badly weakened.
  • In order for this strategy, which the U.S. inherited from the British, to work, the United States needs an effective and relevant alliance structure.
  • The balance-of-power strategy assumes that there are core allies who have an interest in aligning with the United States against regional enemies. When I say effective, I mean allies that are capable of defending themselves to a great extent. Allying with the impotent achieves little. By relevant, I mean allies that are geographically positioned to deal with particularly dangerous hegemons.
  • If we assume Russians to be dangerous hegemons, then the relevant allies are those on the periphery of Russia.
  • The American relationship in all alliances is that the outcome of conflicts must matter more to the ally than to the United States. 
  • The point here is that NATO, which was extremely valuable during the Cold War, may not be a relevant or effective instrument in a new confrontation with the Russians.
  • And since the goal of an effective balance-of-power strategy is the avoidance of war while containing a rising power, the lack of an effective deterrence matters a great deal.
  • It is not certain by any means that Russia is the main threat to American power.
  • In these and other potential cases, the ultimate problem for the United States is that its engagement in Eurasia is at distance. It takes a great deal of time to deploy a technology-heavy force there, and it must be technology-heavy because U.S. forces are always outnumbered when fighting in Eurasia.
  • In many cases, the United States is not choosing the point of intervention, but a potential enemy is creating a circumstance where intervention is necessary. Therefore, it is unknown to planners where a war might be fought, and it is unknown what kind of force they will be up against.
  • The only thing certain is that it will be far away and take a long time to build up a force. During Desert Storm, it took six months to go on the offensive.
  • American strategy requires a force that can project overwhelming power without massive delays.
  • In Ukraine, for example, had the United States chosen to try to defend eastern Ukraine from Russian attack, it would have been impossible to deploy that force before the Russians took over.
  • The United States will face peer-to-peer or even systemic conflicts in Eurasia. The earlier the United States brings in decisive force, the lower the cost to the United States.
  • Current conventional war-fighting strategy is not dissimilar from that of World War II: It is heavily dependent on equipment and the petroleum to power that equipment.
  • It also follows that the tempo of operations be reduced. The United States has been in constant warfare since 2001.
  • There need to be layers of options between threat and war. 
  • Defense policy must be built on three things: The United States does not know where it will fight. The United States must use war sparingly. The United States must have sufficient technology to compensate for the fact that Americans are always going to be outnumbered in Eurasia. The force that is delivered must overcome this, and it must get there fast.
  • Ranges of new technologies, from hypersonic missiles to electronically and mechanically enhanced infantryman, are available. But the mindset that peer-to-peer conflict has been abolished and that small unit operations in the Middle East are the permanent features of warfare prevent these new technologies from being considered.
  • Losing an asymmetric war is unfortunate but tolerable. Losing a systemic war could be catastrophic. Not having to fight a war would be best.
  • anonymous on 08 Apr 14
     
    "Ever since the end of the Cold War, there has been an assumption that conventional warfare between reasonably developed nation-states had been abolished. During the 1990s, it was expected that the primary purpose of the military would be operations other than war, such as peacekeeping, disaster relief and the change of oppressive regimes. After 9/11, many began speaking of asymmetric warfare and "the long war." Under this model, the United States would be engaged in counterterrorism activities in a broad area of the Islamic world for a very long time. Peer-to-peer conflict seemed obsolete."
anonymous

How consciousness works - 0 views

www.aeonmagazine.com/...how-consciousness-works

shared by anonymous on 23 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • I admit that the theory does not feel satisfying; but a theory does not need to be satisfying to be true.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Aug 13
       
      Somebody tattoo that on the back of everyone's eyelids.
  • And indeed, the theory might be able to explain a few other common myths that brains tell themselves. What about out-of-body experiences? The belief that awareness can emanate from a person’s eyes and touch someone else? That you can push on objects with your mind? That the soul lives on after the death of the body? One of the more interesting aspects of the attention schema theory is that it does not need to turn its back on such persistent beliefs. It might even explain their origin.
  • If awareness is a model of attention, how is it simplified? How is it inaccurate? Well, one easy way to keep track of attention is to give it a spatial structure — to treat it like a substance that flows from a source to a target.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Science commonly regards ghost-ish intuitions to be the result of ignorance, superstition, or faulty intelligence. In the attention schema theory, however, they are not simply ignorant mistakes. Those intuitions are ubiquitous among cultures because we humans come equipped with a handy, simplified model of attention. That model informs our intuitions.
  • The very existence of the out-of-body experience suggests that awareness is a computation and that the computation can be disrupted. Systems in the brain not only compute the information that I am aware, but also compute a spatial framework for it, a location, and a perspective. Screw up the computations, and I screw up my understanding of my own awareness.
  • a study by the psychologist Gerald Winer and colleagues at the University of Ohio in 2002 found that about half of American college students also think that we see because of rays that come out of the eyes.
  • Our culture, too, is riddled with the extramission theory.
  • Why should a physically inaccurate description of vision be so persistent? Perhaps because the brain constructs a simplified, handy model of attention in which there is such a thing as awareness, an invisible, intangible stuff that flows from inside a person out to some target object.
  • We come pre-equipped with that intuition, not because it is physically accurate but because it is a useful model.
  • Many of our superstitions — our beliefs in souls and spirits and mental magic — might emerge naturally from the simplifications and shortcuts the brain takes when representing itself and its world.
  • We have the ability to rise above our immediate intuitions and predispositions.
  • Most of us intuitively understand it to be an active thing: it helps us to decide what to do and when. And yet, at least some of the scientific work on consciousness has proposed the opposite, counter-intuitive view: that it doesn’t really do anything at all
  • It seems, therefore, that at least some of our conscious choices are rationalisations after the fact.
  • But if consciousness is a story we tell ourselves, why do we need it? Why are we aware of anything at all? Why not just be skilful automata, without the overlay of subjectivity? Some philosophers think we are automata and just don’t know it.
  • This idea that consciousness has no leverage in the world, that it’s just a rationalisation to make us feel better about ourselves, is terribly bleak.
  • It is not a theory about the uselessness or non-being of consciousness, but about its central importance. Why did an awareness of stuff evolve in the first place?
  • Because it had a practical benefit.
  • the attention schema theory is in agreement with the common intuition: consciousness plays an active role in guiding our behaviour. It is not merely an aura that floats uselessly in our heads. It is a part of the executive control system.
  • To attribute awareness to oneself, to have that computational ability, is the first step towards attributing it to others. That, in turn, leads to a remarkable evolutionary transition to social intelligence.
  • We live embedded in a matrix of perceived consciousness. Most people experience a world crowded with other minds, constantly thinking and feeling and choosing.
  • anonymous on 23 Aug 13
     
    "Scientific talks can get a little dry, so I try to mix it up. I take out my giant hairy orangutan puppet, do some ventriloquism and quickly become entangled in an argument. I'll be explaining my theory about how the brain - a biological machine - generates consciousness. Kevin, the orangutan, starts heckling me. 'Yeah, well, I don't have a brain. But I'm still conscious. What does that do to your theory?'"
anonymous

On the Blockade... - 0 views

fpwatch.blogspot.com/...on-blockade.html

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 02 Jun 10 - Cached
  • I'll also make my usual plea to stop using examples from World War II to justify (or criticize) current policy. The Second World War was arguably the nadir of human ethical conduct. The unimaginably horrific war crimes committed by the Allies only get a pass because of how they contrast with the even-more-incomprehensibly-terrible conduct of the Axis. When "the good guys" are the ones burning civilians to death thousands at a time, committing mass rape and ethnically cleansing whole swathes of conquered territory, maybe it's best to just bracket the whole episode as an unhelpful ethical guidepost.
  • Discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, when they don't devolve into shouting and threats of violence, have a tendency to get caught in a problem of infinite regress, where two disagreeing parties really disagree on some of the fundamental questions involved (is/was the creation of Israel legitimate, is there such a thing as a Palestinian people, who has a truly defensible claim to territory x, y or z, etc), and then extrapolate from those positions heated arguments over particular policies and tactics.
  • These are not "targeted" sanctions that mostly affect Hamas. They deliberately reduce an entire civilian population to subsistence-level existence. Given this, I find any argument that the policy distinguishes between civilians and combatants, or that the suffering inflicted upon civilians is proportional to the military objectives achieved, to be pretty absurd.
  • anonymous on 02 Jun 10
     
    By Matt Eckle at Foreign Policy Watch on June 2, 2010.
anonymous

Twelve Virtues of Rationality - 0 views

yudkowsky.net/virtues

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 02 Jul 10 - Cached
  • The first virtue is curiosity.
  • The second virtue is relinquishment.
  • The third virtue is lightness.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The fourth virtue is evenness.
  • The fifth virtue is argument.
  • The sixth virtue is empiricism.
  • The seventh virtue is simplicity.
  • The eighth virtue is humility.
  • The ninth virtue is perfectionism.
  • The tenth virtue is precision.
  • The eleventh virtue is scholarship.
  • Every step of your reasoning must cut through to the correct answer in the same movement. More than anything, you must think of carrying your map through to reflecting the territory.
  • These then are twelve virtues of rationality: Curiosity, relinquishment, lightness, evenness, argument, empiricism, simplicity, humility, perfectionism, precision, scholarship, and the void.
  • How can you improve your conception of rationality? Not by saying to yourself, “It is my duty to be rational.” By this you only enshrine your mistaken conception. Perhaps your conception of rationality is that it is rational to believe the words of the Great Teacher, and the Great Teacher says, “The sky is green,” and you look up at the sky and see blue. If you think: “It may look like the sky is blue, but rationality is to believe the words of the Great Teacher,” you lose a chance to discover your mistake.
  • anonymous on 02 Jul 10
     
    By Eliezer S. Yudkowsky in 2006.
anonymous

Jon Stewart, you let me down - 0 views

scienceblogs.com/...on_stewart_you_let_me_down.php

religion science layscience

shared by anonymous on 10 Jul 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 10 Jul 10
     
    "The low point came as Stewart tried to justify Robinson's nebulous argument that science and religion need each other, and he offered stock apologetics." By PZ Myers at Pharyngula on July 9, 2010
anonymous

Sun Could Set Suddenly on Superpower as Debt Bites - 1 views

www.realclearworld.com/...power_as_debt_bites_99088.html

generations geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 28 Jul 10 - Cached
  • We have been raised to think of the historical process as an essentially cyclical one. We naturally tend to assume that in our own time, too, history will move cyclically, and slowly.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 28 Jul 10
       
      Really? I had thought that we all assumed a linear-time-frame. Strauss & Howe's cyclical view doesn't strike me as common main-stream thought.
  • Yet what if history is not cyclical and slow-moving but arhythmic, at times almost stationary, but also capable of accelerating suddenly, like a sports car? What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly, like a thief in the night?
  • Complex systems share certain characteristics. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes, what scientists call the amplifier effect.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • What are the implications for the US today? The most obvious point is that imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises: sharp imbalances between revenues and expenditures, and the mounting cost of servicing a mountain of public debt.
  • There is a zero-sum game at the heart of the budgetary process: even if rates stay low, recurrent deficits and debt accumulation mean that interest payments consume a rising proportion of tax revenue. And military expenditure is the item most likely to be squeezed to compensate because, unlike mandatory entitlements (social security, Medicaid and Medicare), defence spending is discretionary.
  • It may not have escaped your notice that China now has the second-largest economy in the world and is almost certain to be the US's principal strategic rival in the 21st century, particularly in the Asia-Pacific.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 28 Jul 10
       
      This is conventional thinking. StratFor disagrees, though. I can't wait to see what *actually* unfolds. One or another could be wrong. Moreover, *both* could be wrong.
  • But what if the sudden waning of American power that I fear brings to an abrupt end the era of US hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region? Are we ready for such a dramatic change in the global balance of power?
  • anonymous on 28 Jul 10
     
    A counter-argument to Strauss & Howe's generational view of the world - with particular regard to global power-politics. By Niall Ferguson at RealClearWorld on July 28, 2010. Hat Tip to Matt Eckel at Foreign Policy Watch (http://fpwatch.blogspot.com/2010/07/again-on-empire-and-punctuated.html).
anonymous

Why comedian Louis C.K.'s appearance and race talk matters - 0 views

theloop21.com/...why-louis-ck-matters

media racism

shared by anonymous on 14 Jul 10 - Cached
  • My friend Lilah has been encouraging me to listen to Louis C.K.'s stand up for months.
 "He talks about race all the time!"
 I could not, as when urged to do something someone says I will really like, I refuse to move (I pull on the leash like Lilah's dog does suddenly and for no apparent reason).
  • When a white man does something that black people have been doing for ages, he gets a lot of praise and overshadows the others. This is not news. Black comedians have been talking about race frankly and honestly for years. The attention Louis C.K. gets may anger some. He's doing the same thing we've been doing forever, he's just white. But his whiteness is exactly what's important. He is white. Blindingly white. Red headed and baldingly white. Everyday American white. One million of McCain/Palin supporters can even relate to. If this man, this man, talks about race and sexuality in a passionate, and unembarrassed way while maintaining his masculinity and humor all without a hint of self righteousness, maybe others will follow his lead. Maybe.
  • anonymous on 14 Jul 10
     
    "He makes race more easily palatable to white America." An interesting argument by Kartina Richardson at TheLoop21 on July 14, 2010.
anonymous

Objectivism & "Metaphysics" (Part 1) - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...tivism-metaphysics-part-1.html

philosophy criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 27 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Metaphysics, in the proper sense of the word, is dialectical physics, or an attempt to determine matters of fact by means of logical or moral or rhetorical constructions.
  • Even when used to defend postulates that are basically sound, metaphysics remains, in the words of F. H. Bradley, “the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.”
  • Karl Popper applied the word metaphysics to any claims or conjectures that are not empirically testable.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • I don’t choose to call my so-called “basic view” of the universe metaphysical. It is merely, as Santayana calls it, cosmology or natural philosophy.
  • Unlike Rand, I don’t believe these basic presuppositions can be defended or validated via axioms or logical argumentation. All these fundamental presuppositions may conceivably be illusory—that is to say, the arguments against them cannot be decisively refuted. They are presuppositions which nature has bred in us (probably via evolution) and which have proved their worth, not by logic, but through centuries of practice.
  • They neither require nor are amenable to logical justification.
  • The belief that all human contentions and presuppositions require explicit philosophical justification constitutes a false demand.
  • Rand’s foundationalism only serves to encourage rationalization, verbalism, essentialism, and other modes of empty speculation, and is often symptomatic of a dogmatic turn of mind that has trouble accepting the provisional and conjectural nature of knowledge.
  • anonymous on 27 Jul 10
     
    "Rand defined metaphysics as "the study of existence as such or, in Aristotle's words, of 'being qua being.'" Well, that sure narrows it down!" By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on July 26, 2010.
anonymous

Finishing School - 0 views

www.slate.com/...all

education

shared by anonymous on 11 Aug 10 - Cached
  • The proportion of full-time college professors with tenure has fallen from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007. The numbers for 2009, soon to be released by the Department of Education, are expected to dip even lower.
  • To which some educators are saying: good riddance.
  • As tuition climbs and universities struggle to pay their bills, tenure is starting to look unaffordable. Keeping a professor around indefinitely—tenure means they can't be forced to retire—simply costs a lot.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • "Publish or perish" is the maxim of tenure-track professors. The corollary, of course, would be "teach and perish." Tenure committees claim to weigh publishing and teaching equally, but in practice publishing counts most. Taylor recalls a colleague winning a teaching award early in his career. Mentors urged him not to put it on his résumé. When the best young teachers focus their energies on writing rather than teaching, students pay the price.
  • The most common pro-tenure argument is that it protects academic freedom. Once a professor gains tenure, the thinking goes, he or she can say anything without fear of being fired. Academia thrives on the circulation of dangerous ideas.
  • The problem is, for every tenured professor who's liberated at age 40 to speak his mind, there are dozens of junior professors terrified to say anything the least bit controversial, lest they lose their one shot at job security for life.
  • Just as tenure creates economic inflexibility, it also creates intellectual inflexibility. By hiring someone for life, a school gambles that his or her ideas are going to be just as relevant in 35 years. Tenure can also discourage interdisciplinary studies, since professors are rewarded for plumbing deep into an established subject area rather than connecting two different ones.
  • But the clincher for the anti-tenure argument may come from the very people it is supposed to benefit: academics. Specifically, young academics. Consider the career path of an aspiring full-time tenured professor: Four years of college, six years getting a doctorate, four to six years as a post-doc, and then six years on the tenure track. By the time you come up for tenure, you're 40.
  • "All sorts of brilliant people want to be members of academe," says Trower. "I don't think it's because of tenure. It's because of the work." The life of the mind is its own reward.
  • Create a tenure track that explicitly rewards teaching. Give interdisciplinary centers the authority to produce tenured professors. Allow for breaks in the tenure track if a professor needs to take time off. Offer the option of part-time tenure, a lower-cost alternative for professors who want to hold other jobs.
  • anonymous on 11 Aug 10
     
    "The case for getting rid of tenure." By Christopher Beam at Slate Magazine on August 11, 2010
anonymous

We Only Trust Experts If They Agree with Us - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...episode.cfm

criticalthinking layscience

shared by anonymous on 21 Sep 10 - Cached
  • The investigators found similar results for various other issues, from nuclear waste disposal to gun control. Said one of the authors, “People tend to keep a biased score of what experts believe, counting a scientist as an 'expert' only when that scientist agrees with the position they find culturally congenial."
  • anonymous on 21 Sep 10
     
    We only consider scientists to be experts when their argument is in line with our own previously held beliefs." By Christie Nicholson at Scientific American Podcast on September 18, 2010.
anonymous

Tales of the Tea Party - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...18douthat.html

politics

shared by anonymous on 18 Oct 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 18 Oct 10
     
    "Ekins, a former CATO Institute intern, was examining the liberal conceit that Tea Party marches are rife with racism and conspiracy theorizing. Last week, The Washington Post reported on her findings: just 5 percent of the 250 signs referenced Barack Obama's race or religion, and 1 percent brought up his birth certificate. The majority focused on bailouts, deficits and spending - exactly the issues the Tea Partiers claim inspired their movement in the first place. " A provocative argument *for* Tea Partiers. While it lacks in specifics, it doesn't disappoint, and manages to address the movement without treating it like a cartoon. By Ross Douthat at The New York Times on October 17, 2010.
anonymous

The Skeptic's Skeptic: Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 03 Nov 10 - Cached
  • If God created the eye, then how do creationists explain the blind salamander? “The most they can do is to intone that ‘the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’” Hitchens mused. “Whereas the likelihood that the postocular blind­ness of underground salamanders is another aspect of evolution by natural selection seems, when you think about it at all, so overwhelmingly probable as to con­stitute a near certainty.”
  • To wit, after watching a quack medicine man fleecing India’s poor one Sunday afternoon, the belletrist scowled in a 2003 Slate column, “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” The observation is worthy of elevation to a dictum.
  • So, the question can and must be rephrased: ‘Why will our brief ‘something’ so soon be replaced with nothing?’ It’s only once we shake our own innate belief in linear progression and consider the many recessions we have undergone and will undergo that we can grasp the gross stupidity of those who repose their faith in divine providence and godly design.”
  • anonymous on 03 Nov 10
     
    "Science values data and statistics and champions the virtues of evidence and experimentation. Those of us "viewing the world with a rational eye" (as the new descriptor for this column reads) also have another, underutilized tool at our disposal: rapier logic like that of Christopher Hitchens, a practiced logician trained in rhetoric. Hitchens-who is "leaving the party a bit earlier than I'd like" because of esophageal cancer, as he lamented to Charlie Rose in a recent PBS interview-has something deeply important to offer on how to think about unscientific claims. Although he has no formal training in science, I would pit Hitchens against any of the purveyors of pseudoscientific clap­trap because of his unique and enviable skill at peeling back the layers of an argument and cutting to its core." By Michael Shermer at Scientific American on November 3, 2010.
anonymous

Why environmentalism is a conservative concern - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...environmentalism-conservative

environmentalism longnow sustainability conservatism

shared by anonymous on 11 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Nov 10
     
    "Conservative thinking provides a deep well of arguments for protecting the environment and tackling climate change" By Paul Foote at The Guardian on November 11, 2010.
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