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Intellectual Sources of Latest Objectischism 1 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...lectual-sources-of-latest.html objectivism criticalthinking philosophy
shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 10 - Cached
  • The Objectivist theory of history.
  • Individuals lacking detailed knowledge of history and insight into human nature can makes assertions which, however implausible they may appear to the wise, cannot be decisively refuted.
  • One such theory is the Objectivist "philosophy of history," which claims that the course of history is largely governed by broad philosophical abstractions devised by mankinds "greatest" philosophers
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Explaining these things is important for a very simple reason. The very fact that Rand's political and ethical preferences have not fared well in the past would seem to constitute evidence that they are not likely to fare well in the future.
  • Rand tries to solve these problems by asserting that the failure of self-interest and laissez-faire ultimately stems from a "concerted attack on man's conceptual faculty," itself a product of the failure of modern philosphers to solve the "problem of universals."
  • The Objectivist caricatures of great philosophers constituted a major intellectual embarrassment which made Rand's philosophy a tough sell, even among those scholars who might otherwise have been inclined to give it a place at the academic trough.
  • There is the claim (p. 59) that “modern philosophers declare that axioms are a matter of arbitrary choice.” (no substantiation or reference is provided). There is the claim (p. 52) that “It is Aristotle who identified the fact that only concretes exist”. (Any of you Aristotle scholars want to wade in here with a brief account of particulars vs. concretes?) And none of this comes with even a hint of specific attribution that would allow a reader to evaluate it. The closest she gets is along the lines of (p. 60) “For example, see the works of Kant and Hegel.” Now that really narrows it down.
  • Objectivism's shoddy scholarship -- its egregious tendency to make extravagently controversial claims based either on bad evidence or no evidence -- is bound to attract unfavorable attention.
  • Rand and her disciples, afflicted with the sort of monomaniacal confirmation bias that tends to govern most ideologues, were ever vigilant for even the most negligible "evidence" of Kant's irrationality nibbling away at the host organism.
  • Many of the leading theories and concepts in physics were couched in terms calculated to arouse Rand's ire, such as Theory of Relativity, Uncertainty Principle, observer effect, wave-particle duality, etc. Such terms suggested a discipline awash in the horrors of Kantian subjectivity. An exorcism, involving rigorous Objectivist criticism, seemed called for. But there were no Objectivists up to the task, none having the requisite "expertise" in physics -- none, that is, until David Harriman arrived on the scene.
  • At the core of Objectivism there has long been a tension between Rand's pretense to rationality and reason and some of her fundamental beliefs, which are neither rational nor in line with the best scientific evidence.
  • Among the Objectivist faithful, there exists a genuine admiration of hard science, which is regarded as an exemplar of "reason," that holy of holies within the Objectivist ideology.
  • What makes the email particularly hard to swallow for the Objectivist faithful was its blatantly irrational appeal to naked authority and its contempt for rational discourse.
  • once an Objectivist manages (often against great odds) to secure an academic position, he finds himself beholden to two masters. On the one hand, he must remain ideological pure in the eyes of the Objectivist cognescenti over at ARI, and on the other, he must maintain a facade of professorial respectability among his colleagues within academia.
  • In disciplines where no strict consensus holds sway, this may not be so very difficult; but in the hard sciences, challenging the consensus on the basis of poor or non-existent scholarship is rarely tolerated.
  • As long as Objectivism continues to hold to its bosom positions about human nature and history that run foul of experimental psychology and historical scholarship, these rifts will continue to widen. There's no escaping it. Yet there is another problem that may prove, in the end, even more intractable. Objectivism has no way of rationally settling conflicts that arise among its denizens. This subject I will explore in my next post.
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 10
     
    "Since the McCaskey schism is (as Daniel Barnes has noted) largely arose from "philosophical" issues, it might be illuminating to go over the sources of this particular intellectual imbroglio. There are, as far I can ascertain, three main sources: (1) The Objectivist theory of history (2) The Objectivist concept of "reason" (3) The Problem of Induction Since Daniel has already covered No. 3, that leaves us with the first two. In this post I'll cover No. 1." By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on November 16, 2010.
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US scientists significantly more likely to publish fake research - 0 views

www.labspaces.net/...ikely_to_publish_fake_research layscience science research
shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 10 - Cached
  • The study author searched the PubMed database for every scientific research paper that had been withdrawn—and therefore officially expunged from the public record—between 2000 and 2010.
  • "The duplicity of some authors is cause for concern," comments the author. Retraction is the strongest sanction that can be applied to published research, but currently, "[it] is a very blunt instrument used for offences both gravely serious and trivial."
  • And lets not let journals from other countries get off the hook, they publish fake stuff and duplicative research.  They just don't retract it.
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 10
     
    "US scientists are significantly more likely to publish fake research than scientists from elsewhere, finds a trawl of officially withdrawn (retracted) studies, published online in the Journal of Medical Ethics." At Lab Spaces on November 16, 2010.
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Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...8269 layscience science criticalthinking data
shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 10 - Cached
  • or whatever reason, the appendices removed from patients with Albanian names in six Greek hospitals were more than three times as likely to be perfectly healthy as those removed from patients with Greek names.
  • One of the researchers, a biostatistician named Georgia Salanti, fired up a laptop and projector and started to take the group through a study she and a few colleagues were completing that asked this question: were drug companies manipulating published research to make their drugs look good?
  • Just as I was getting the sense that the data in drug studies were endlessly malleable, Ioannidis, who had mostly been listening, delivered what felt like a coup de grâce: wasn’t it possible, he asked, that drug companies were carefully selecting the topics of their studies—for example, comparing their new drugs against those already known to be inferior to others on the market—so that they were ahead of the game even before the data juggling began?
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  • Maybe sometimes it’s the questions that are biased, not the answers,” he said, flashing a friendly smile.
  • That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research.
  • He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong.
  • He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed.
  • “I take all the researchers who visit me here, and almost every single one of them asks the tree the same question,” Ioannidis tells me, as we contemplate the tree the day after the team’s meeting. “‘Will my research grant be approved?’” He chuckles, but Ioannidis (pronounced yo-NEE-dees) tends to laugh not so much in mirth as to soften the sting of his attack. And sure enough, he goes on to suggest that an obsession with winning funding has gone a long way toward weakening the reliability of medical research.
  • “I assumed that everything we physicians did was basically right, but now I was going to help verify it,” he says. “All we’d have to do was systematically review the evidence, trust what it told us, and then everything would be perfect.” It didn’t turn out that way. In poring over medical journals, he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings. Of course, medical-science “never minds” are hardly secret. And they sometimes make headlines, as when in recent years large studies or growing consensuses of researchers concluded that mammograms, colonoscopies, and PSA tests are far less useful cancer-detection tools than we had been told; or when widely prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil were revealed to be no more effective than a placebo for most cases of depression; or when we learned that staying out of the sun entirely can actually increase cancer risks; or when we were told that the advice to drink lots of water during intense exercise was potentially fatal; or when, last April, we were informed that taking fish oil, exercising, and doing puzzles doesn’t really help fend off Alzheimer’s disease, as long claimed. Peer-reviewed studies have come to opposite conclusions on whether using cell phones can cause brain cancer, whether sleeping more than eight hours a night is healthful or dangerous, whether taking aspirin every day is more likely to save your life or cut it short, and whether routine angioplasty works better than pills to unclog heart arteries.
  • “I realized even our gold-standard research had a lot of problems,” he says.
  • This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was. “The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them. We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”
  • Perhaps only a minority of researchers were succumbing to this bias, but their distorted findings were having an outsize effect on published research.
  • In 2005, he unleashed two papers that challenged the foundations of medical research.
  • He chose to publish one paper, fittingly, in the online journal PLoS Medicine, which is committed to running any methodologically sound article without regard to how “interesting” the results may be. In the paper, Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time.
  • The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views.
  • sure, a lot of dubious research makes it into journals, but we researchers and physicians know to ignore it and focus on the good stuff, so what’s the big deal? The other paper headed off that claim.
  • Ioannidis was putting his contentions to the test not against run-of-the-mill research, or even merely well-accepted research, but against the absolute tip of the research pyramid. Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable. That article was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
  • When a five-year study of 10,000 people finds that those who take more vitamin X are less likely to get cancer Y, you’d think you have pretty good reason to take more vitamin X, and physicians routinely pass these recommendations on to patients. But these studies often sharply conflict with one another. Studies have gone back and forth on the cancer-preventing powers of vitamins A, D, and E; on the heart-health benefits of eating fat and carbs; and even on the question of whether being overweight is more likely to extend or shorten your life. How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.
  • the odds are that in any large database of many nutritional and health factors, there will be a few apparent connections that are in fact merely flukes, not real health effects—it’s a bit like combing through long, random strings of letters and claiming there’s an important message in any words that happen to turn up.
  • But even if a study managed to highlight a genuine health connection to some nutrient, you’re unlikely to benefit much from taking more of it, because we consume thousands of nutrients that act together as a sort of network, and changing intake of just one of them is bound to cause ripples throughout the network that are far too complex for these studies to detect, and that may be as likely to harm you as help you.
  • nd these problems are aside from ubiquitous measurement errors (for example, people habitually misreport their diets in studies), routine misanalysis (researchers rely on complex software capable of juggling results in ways they don’t always understand), and the less common, but serious, problem of outright fraud (which has been revealed, in confidential surveys, to be much more widespread than scientists like to acknowledge).
  • And so it goes for all medical studies, he says. Indeed, nutritional studies aren’t the worst. Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest. The exciting links between genes and various diseases and traits that are relentlessly hyped in the press for heralding miraculous around-the-corner treatments for everything from colon cancer to schizophrenia have in the past proved so vulnerable to error and distortion, Ioannidis has found, that in some cases you’d have done about as well by throwing darts at a chart of the genome.
  • Though scientists and science journalists are constantly talking up the value of the peer-review process, researchers admit among themselves that biased, erroneous, and even blatantly fraudulent studies easily slip through it.
  • The ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly retest each other’s results—except they don’t. Only the most prominent findings are likely to be put to the test, because there’s likely to be publication payoff in firming up the proof, or contradicting it.
  • Of those 45 super-cited studies that Ioannidis focused on, 11 had never been retested. Perhaps worse, Ioannidis found that even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades. He looked at three prominent health studies from the 1980s and 1990s that were each later soundly refuted, and discovered that researchers continued to cite the original results as correct more often than as flawed—in one case for at least 12 years after the results were discredited.
  • Medical research is not especially plagued with wrongness. Other meta-research experts have confirmed that similar issues distort research in all fields of science, from physics to economics (where the highly regarded economists J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang once showed how a remarkably consistent paucity of strong evidence in published economics studies made it unlikely that any of them were right).
  • Ioannidis initially thought the community might come out fighting. Instead, it seemed relieved, as if it had been guiltily waiting for someone to blow the whistle, and eager to hear more. David Gorski, a surgeon and researcher at Detroit’s Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, noted in his prominent medical blog that when he presented Ioannidis’s paper on highly cited research at a professional meeting, “not a single one of my surgical colleagues was the least bit surprised or disturbed by its findings.” Ioannidis offers a theory for the relatively calm reception. “I think that people didn’t feel I was only trying to provoke them, because I showed that it was a community problem, instead of pointing fingers at individual examples of bad research,” he says. In a sense, he gave scientists an opportunity to cluck about the wrongness without having to acknowledge that they themselves succumb to it—it was something everyone else did.
  • The irony of his having achieved this sort of success by accusing the medical-research community of chasing after success is not lost on him, and he notes that it ought to raise the question of whether he himself might be pumping up his findings.
  • “If I did a study and the results showed that in fact there wasn’t really much bias in research, would I be willing to publish it?” he asks. “That would create a real psychological conflict for me.” But his bigger worry, he says, is that while his fellow researchers seem to be getting the message, he hasn’t necessarily forced anyone to do a better job. He fears he won’t in the end have done much to improve anyone’s health. “There may not be fierce objections to what I’m saying,” he explains. “But it’s difficult to change the way that everyday doctors, patients, and healthy people think and behave.”
  • What they’re not trained to do is to go back and look at the research papers that helped make these drugs the standard of care.
  • Tatsioni doesn’t so much fear that someone will carve out the man’s healthy appendix. Rather, she’s concerned that, like many patients, he’ll end up with prescriptions for multiple drugs that will do little to help him, and may well harm him. “Usually what happens is that the doctor will ask for a suite of biochemical tests—liver fat, pancreas function, and so on,” she tells me. “The tests could turn up something, but they’re probably irrelevant. Just having a good talk with the patient and getting a close history is much more likely to tell me what’s wrong.” Of course, the doctors have all been trained to order these tests, she notes, and doing so is a lot quicker than a long bedside chat. They’re also trained to ply the patient with whatever drugs might help whack any errant test numbers back into line.
  • patients often don’t even like it when they’re taken off their drugs, she explains; they find their prescriptions reassuring.
  • “Researchers and physicians often don’t understand each other; they speak different languages,” he says. Knowing that some of his researchers are spending more than half their time seeing patients makes him feel the team is better positioned to bridge that gap; their experience informs the team’s research with firsthand knowledge, and helps the team shape its papers in a way more likely to hit home with physicians.
  • Already feeling that they’re fighting to keep patients from turning to alternative medical treatments such as homeopathy, or misdiagnosing themselves on the Internet, or simply neglecting medical treatment altogether, many researchers and physicians aren’t eager to provide even more reason to be skeptical of what doctors do—not to mention how public disenchantment with medicine could affect research funding.
  • “If we don’t tell the public about these problems, then we’re no better than nonscientists who falsely claim they can heal,” he says. “If the drugs don’t work and we’re not sure how to treat something, why should we claim differently? Some fear that there may be less funding because we stop claiming we can prove we have miraculous treatments. But if we can’t really provide those miracles, how long will we be able to fool the public anyway? The scientific enterprise is probably the most fantastic achievement in human history, but that doesn’t mean we have a right to overstate what we’re accomplishing.”
  • being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 10
     
    "Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors-to a striking extent-still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science." By David H. Freedman at The Atlantic on November 2010.
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Maps from 1942 of the never-was Nazi invasion of North America - 0 views

io9.com/...nazi-invasion-of-north-america counterfactuals history geopolitics
shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 10
     
    "These diagrams from the March 2, 1942 issue of Life detailed the Nazi invasion of America shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Check out such alternate reality battles like the bombing of Detroit and invasion of Norfolk, Virginia. These maps were created as a follow-up to an article about an American defeat in WWII by pioneering science fiction author Philip Wylie, who wrote the proto-superhero novel Gladiator. These maps were made in the early days of US involvement in World War II, so there was a sense that this invasion was a real possibility. You can read more about these maps at Ptak Science Books."
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Ted Koppel, Bad Reporter - 0 views

www.slate.com/...all
shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 10 - Cached
  • In both the Post and Times pieces, he accuses the cable networks of giving audiences what they want instead of what they need to know because it's the best way to secure advertising profits.
  • The assertion that TV network news lost money everywhere until Don Hewitt birthed 60 Minutes is frequently repeated. But it's wrong—dead wrong—as a paper in the December issue of Journalism by Michael J. Socolow of the University of Maine shows.
  • The idea of the philanthropic news division continues to be propagated because network journalists—and their employers—derive benefits from its public dissemination. It allows journalists to indulge in jeremiads about the decline of journalistic standards and the intensity of contemporary corporate pressure.
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  • NBC News' nightly news program, The Huntley-Brinkley Report, brought in an estimated $27 million a year in network advertising revenues, making it NBC's highest-grossing show.
  • Weaver wrote that a show would get billed $60 whenever the NBC staff repaired a broken ladder that originally cost just $4.
  • More accounting tricks: After NBC stated that it spent $800,000 on the coverage of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, hospitalization, and funeral, it admitted to reporter Edward Jay Epstein that at least $500,000 of that included salaries of existing news crews and technicians and "general overhead" that had to be paid regardless.
  • Socolow amply documents that making money from news was already a tradition at CBS and NBC in the radio era, writing that "by 1944 news programming provided the majority of NBC's revenues."
  • If Koppel is so keen on criticizing the sensationalizers and popularizers of TV news who are bent on turning profits, won't he please look in the mirror?
  • There's a lot wrong with broadcast and cable news, but hustling for profits isn't their main fault and never has been.
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 10
     
    "ABC News veteran Ted Koppel ladles out self-serving news nostalgia in the Washington Post." By Jack Shafer at Slate on November 15, 2010.
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Supercomputers 'will fit in a sugar cube,' IBM says - 0 views

www.kurzweilai.net/l-fit-in-a-sugar-cube-ibm-says technology
shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 10
     
    "A pioneering research effort could shrink the world's most powerful supercomputer processors to the size of a sugar cube, IBM scientists say. The approach will see many computer processors stacked on top of one another, cooling them with water flowing between each one." At Kurzweil, but by BBC News on November 12, 2010.
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Merkel Defends Germany's Leadership - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...el_defends_germanys_leadership geopolitics germany europe
shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 10 - Cached
  • Merkel defended the euro and Berlin’s efforts earlier in the year to bail out Greece, adding that Germany’s role is to “anchor a new stability culture in Europe,” concluding as she did at the height of the Greek sovereign crisis that “if the euro fails, then Europe fails.”
  • Merkel defended the euro and Berlin’s efforts earlier in the year to bail out Greece
  • She made a case for military reform that would end conscription in Germany
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  • The chancellor reaffirmed Germany’s Christian identity, stressing that “whoever wants to live here must learn German … (and) obey our laws,”
  • Merkel warned that Germany’s place as a global economic powerhouse was not assured or preordained
  • Germany is ascending to what it feels is its rightful place as a global power, if not one of the world’s true superpowers
  • This is not to say that such language does not still elicit an uncomfortable cringe from a wide spectrum of the German public and politicians. It does. However, Merkel gave Germans a very simple choice on Monday. They will either begin to speak of German European leadership, German military efficiency and German Judeo-Christian identity, or face being “left behind” by the world powers such as China, the United States and Russia, which have no qualms about such rhetoric.
  • This means both that Germany is firing at all cylinders and that it is relatively unimpeded by expenditures on youth and the elderly. Within a decade, however, Germany will see its productive age groups begin to retire, reducing its output and increasing burdens on the state.
  • Germany’s post-Cold War generation, born in the 1990s and psychologically unencumbered by Germany’s WWII experience, will also come to power at this moment.
  • Current Cold War-era institutions that dominate Europe politically, economically and in terms of security — the European Union and NATO — were not originally designed for a unified, assertive and unashamed Germany. The Germany that Merkel spoke to on Monday will either make these institutions work for Berlin or will leave them behind.
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 10
     
    "German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday gave an expansive 75-minute speech at a conference of the German ruling party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Merkel was re-elected at the conference as the party's leader with more than 90 percent of the vote, indicating that her support within the party remains strong despite slumping popularity of the CDU in recent polling." At StratFor on November 16, 2010.
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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.
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A study confirms every suspicion you ever had about high-school dating - 0 views

www.slate.com/...2274570 culture
shared by anonymous on 15 Nov 10 - Cached
  • A recently released paper—called "Terms of Endearment," but don't hold its too-cute title against it—looked at how and when high-school students choose mates and their preferences when searching for a partner.
  • in examining the Add Health data, he and his colleagues found one classic economic tenet driving the byzantine high-school dating market: Scarcity determines value. Among freshman boys, what's rare, and therefore valuable, are freshman girls willing to have a relationship and, even better, willing to have sex. Among senior girls, what's valuable and scarce are boys willing to have a relationship without having sex.
  • Dating, in other words, is a market like any other, and market power is determined by the abundance of resources.
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  • The conclusion? Though high-school girls don't really want to have sex, many more of them end up doing so in order to "match" with a high-school boy. For them, a relationship at some point becomes more important than purity. Because of that phenomenon, in schools with more boys than girls, the girls hold more cards and have less sex. Where there are more girls, the male preference for sex tends to win out.
  • And who does the high-school dating system disadvantage most, statistically? Senior girls, at least according to the skew between stated sexual preferences and actual sexual activity. Though that will undoubtedly come as cold comfort to those legions of lonely 14-year-old boys.
  • anonymous on 15 Nov 10
     
    "In the Darwinian world of high-school dating, freshman girls and senior boys have the highest chances of successfully partnering up. Senior girls (too picky!) and freshman boys (pond scum!) have the least. These are truisms known to anyone who has watched 10 minutes of a teen movie or spent 10 minutes in a high school cafeteria. Now, however, social scientists have examined them exhaustively and empirically. And they have found that for the most part, they're accurate. So are some other old prom-era chestnuts: Teen boys are primarily-obsessively?-interested in sex, whereas girls, no matter how boy-crazy, tend to focus on relationships. Young men frequently fib about their sexual experience, whereas young women tend to be more truthful. Once a student has sex, it becomes less of an issue in future relationships." By Annie Lowrey at Slate on November 15, 2010.
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Post-Tea-Party Nation - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...14FOB-idealab-t.html politics
shared by anonymous on 15 Nov 10 - Cached
  • while the Bush administration took wise and bold steps to correct the disaster, the unpopularity of its Troubled Asset Relief Program bequeathed the Obama administration a political disaster alongside the economic disaster.
  • If Republicans are to act effectively and responsibly, we need to learn more positive and productive lessons from the crisis.
  • Lesson 1: The danger of closed information systems.
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  • Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it. This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon.
  • Meanwhile, Republican officeholders who want to explain why they acted to prevent the collapse of the U.S. banking system can get no hearing from voters seized with certainty that a bank collapse would have done no harm to ordinary people.
  • Lesson 2: “The market” (the whole free-market system) must be distinguished from “the markets” (the trading markets for financial assets).
  • the intellectual right accords a deference to the wants and wishes of the financial industry that is seldom accorded to agriculture, manufacturing, transport or retailing.
  • But it’s not always true that what’s good for Goldman Sachs is good for the economy, or vice versa. Nor is what “the markets” want the same as what free-market economics require.
  • Lesson 3: The economy is more important than the budget.
  • During the recession of 1981-82, Democratic politicians demanded that a Republican president set a balanced budget as his top priority. Ronald Reagan disregarded this advice. He held firm to his tax cuts: once the economy returned to prosperity, there would be time then to deal with the deficit. Today, the positions are reversed.
  • eading voices in the Republican Party have convinced themselves that the country is on the verge of hyperinflation — a Weimar moment, says Glenn Beck. But if fiscal stimulus leads to socialism, and quantitative easing leads to Nazism, what on earth are we supposed to do? Cut the budget? But we won’t do that either! On Sean Hannity’s radio show, the Republican House leader John Boehner announced just before the election that one of his first priorities would be the repeal of the Obama Medicare cuts.
  • Lesson 4: Even from a conservative point of view, the welfare state is not all bad.
  • Social Security, unemployment insurance and other benefits were designed as anti-Depression defenses, “automatic stabilizers” as economists called them.
  • Those who denounce unemployment insurance as an invitation to idleness in an economy where there are at least five job seekers for every available job are not just hardening their hearts against distress. They are rejecting the teachings of Milton Friedman, who emphasized the value of automatic stabilizers fully as much as John Maynard Keynes ever did.
  • Lesson 5: Listen to the people — but beware of populism.
  • Non-Tea Party Americans may marvel that any group can think of itself as egalitarian when its main political goals are to cut off government assistance to the poorest and reduce taxes for the richest.
  • But American populism has almost always concentrated its anger against the educated rather than the wealthy. So much so that you might describe contemporary American politics as a class struggle between those with more education than money against those with more money than education
  • The U.S. political system is not a parliamentary system. Power is usually divided. The system is sustained by habits of cooperation, accepted limits on the use of power, implicit restraints on the use of rhetoric.
  • anonymous on 15 Nov 10
     
    "Republicans lost the presidency in 2008 in large part because of the worst economic crisis since World War II. Republicans have now regained the House of Representatives for the same reason. In the interval, Republicans ferociously attacked the Obama administration's economic remedies, and there certainly was a lot to attack. But the impulse to attack, it must be recognized, was based on more than ideology; it also served important psychological imperatives." By David Frum at The New York Times Idea Lab on November 12, 2010.
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Objectivism & "Metaphysics," Part 19 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...ivism-metaphysics-part-19.html criticalthinking objectivism
shared by anonymous on 14 Nov 10 - Cached
  • If the skeptic is not refuted, how can he be prevented from wreaking havoc within society, and sending civilization over the brink?
  • this challenge was laid to rest over two centuries ago by the philosopher often most associated with extreme skepticism, David Hume
  • All discourse, all action would immediately cease; and men remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • What his meaning is? And what he proposes by all these curious researches?
  • He is immediately at a loss, and knows not what to answer.
  • When he awakes from his dream, he will be the first to join in the laugh against himself, and to confess, that all his objections are mere amusement, and can have no other tendency than to show the whimsical condition of mankind, who must act and reason and believe;
  • though they are not able, by their most diligent enquiry, to satisfy themselves concerning the foundation of these operations, or to remove the objections, which may be raised against them
  • Pursing doubt to its ultimate end, Santayana challenges self-consciousness, discourse, logic, change, memory and time. In doing so, he goes well beyond Descartes’ doubts to discover the ultimate certainty, the perusal of a passing datum, a mere instance of awareness.
  • This “solipsism of the present moment,” Santayana concludes, cannot possibly be a bedrock of certainty, because it does not constitute knowledge.
  • Knowledge does not arise until intelligence arrives on the scene and connects these instances of awareness into larger, meaningful wholes, which can then be interpreted as symbols of a posited, external reality existing in time and space.
  • this animal faith is by no means an entirely groundless or “arbitrary” inclination, but one which is tested and corroborated during every moment when intelligence holds dominion over our lives.
  • Critical to Santayana’s view is the notion that some views are biologically inevitable, so that philosophers who deny them are not being altogether sincere.
  • Some beliefs are inevitable because they have been bred in us by evolution (or by “nature,” if you prefer).
  • the nature of truth is correspondence, the test of truth is pragmatic
  • in relation to these issues, often equivocates between rationalistic speculation (e.g., the Objectivist axioms) and an extreme empiricism (e.g., basing all knowledge on the “evidence” of the senses)
  • the ultimate raison d’être of knowledge is to cope with animal needs; and so whatever knowledge best satisfies these needs, which leads to successful action and solves the most problems in the real world, is that knowledge which most likely has the stamp of truth about it.
  • In rising out of passive intuition, I pass, by a vital constitutional necessity, to belief in discourse, in experience, in substance, in truth, and in spirit. All these objects may conceivably be illusory. Belief in them, however, is not grounded on a prior probability, but all judgements of probability are grounded on them. They express a rational instinct or instinctive reason, the waxing faith of an animal living in a world which he can observe and sometimes remodel.
  • anonymous on 14 Nov 10
     
    "Whenever the Objectivist mania for "validating" such things as "reality," "causality," "man's mind," "the senses," "reason," "concepts," and "morality" is subjected to criticism, sooner or later somebody will come forward and suggest that without such validation, how can we know anything? If the skeptic is not refuted, how can he be prevented from wreaking havoc within society, and sending civilization over the brink?" By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on November 13, 2010.
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Olbermann, O'Reilly and the death of real news - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010111202857_pf.html media partisan politics
shared by anonymous on 12 Nov 10 - Cached
  • We celebrate truth as a virtue, but only in the abstract. What we really need in our search for truth is a commodity that used to be at the heart of good journalism: facts - along with a willingness to present those facts without fear or favor. To the degree that broadcast news was a more virtuous operation 40 years ago, it was a function of both fear and innocence. Network executives were afraid that a failure to work in the "public interest, convenience and necessity," as set forth in the Radio Act of 1927, might cause the Federal Communications Commission to suspend or even revoke their licenses.
  • On the innocence side of the ledger, meanwhile, it never occurred to the network brass that news programming could be profitable.
  • It was an imperfect, untidy little Eden of journalism where reporters were motivated to gather facts about important issues. We didn't know that we could become profit centers. No one had bitten into that apple yet.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Broadcast news has been outflanked and will soon be overtaken by scores of other media options. The need for clear, objective reporting in a world of rising religious fundamentalism, economic interdependence and global ecological problems is probably greater than it has ever been. But we are no longer a national audience receiving news from a handful of trusted gatekeepers; we're now a million or more clusters of consumers, harvesting information from like-minded providers.
  • anonymous on 12 Nov 10
     
    "And so, among the many benefits we have come to believe the founding fathers intended for us, the latest is news we can choose. Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone." By Ted Koppel at The Washington Post on November 14, 2010.
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Want to Defuse the Iran Crisis? - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...want_to_defuse_the_iran_crisis geopolitics
shared by anonymous on 12 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 12 Nov 10
     
    "Sometime in the next few weeks, if the parties can agree on a place and date convenient to all sides, Iran and the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany, known as the "P5+1," will meet for the first time since October 2009 to revive diplomacy over Iran's nuclear program. This is welcome news for U.S. President Barack Obama who, almost two years into his first term, has learned the hard way that diplomacy with Iran is neither quick nor easy. " By Trita Parsi & Reza Marashi at Foreign Policy at Foreign Policy on November 12, 2010.
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10 Market Bubbles That Could Soon Burst - 0 views

www.dailyfinance.com/...19708093 economics predictions
shared by anonymous on 12 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 12 Nov 10
     
    "The president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, Navayana Kocherlakota, recently published a paper in which he argues that government guarantees helped fuel the bubble in real estate. While his paper was largely aimed at prescribing solutions to this problem, it raises the question: What other bubbles are lurking out there in the global economy? We asked several experts and to our surprise, they had a long list: " By Charles Wallace at Daily Finance on November 9, 2010.
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Bah Sophistication - 0 views

www.overcomingbias.com/...bah-sophistication.html culture
shared by anonymous on 12 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 12 Nov 10
     
    "On the radio recently some guy said he didn't want his new kid to have electronic toys, so he looked up his old favorite, Legos, on the web. He was horrified to see websites for obsessive adult male hobbyists, who devoted decades and huge sums to develop lego masterpieces. He worried his kid might grow up like that. Me, I worry my kids will grow up to be the opposite: sophisticated." By Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias on November 12, 2010.
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Justice Stevens on 'Invidious Prejudice' - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...10wed4.html liberty islam america criticalthinking
shared by anonymous on 11 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Nov 10
     
    A great deal of what public figures have said about the proposed Islamic cultural center near ground zero in Lower Manhattan has been aimed at playing off fear and intolerance for political gain. Former Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court, on the other hand, delivered one of the sanest and most instructive arguments for tolerance that we have heard in a long time. Justice Stevens, who retired at the end of the court's last term, served for two and a half years as an intelligence officer in Pearl Harbor during World War II. In a speech on Thursday in Washington, he confessed his initial negative reaction decades later at seeing dozens of Japanese tourists visiting the U.S.S. Arizona memorial. "Those people don't really belong here," he recalled thinking about the Japanese tourists. "We won the war. They lost it. We shouldn't allow them to celebrate their attack on Pearl Harbor even if it was one of their greatest victories." But then Justice Stevens said that he recognized his mistake in "drawing inferences" about the group of tourists that might not apply to any of them. "The Japanese tourists were not responsible for what some of their countrymen did decades ago," he said, just as "the Muslims planning to build the mosque are not responsible for what an entirely different group of Muslims did on 9/11." Many Muslims who pray in New York City mosques, he added, "may well have come to America to escape the intolerance of radicals like those who dominate the Taliban." Descendants of pilgrims "who came to America in the 17th century to escape religious persecutions" and helped establish our democracy should get that, he said. Justice Stevens ended with a powerful message that participants in the debate over the mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan should heed: "Ignorance - that is to say, fear of the unknown - is the source of most invidious prejudice." At The New York Times on November 9, 2010.
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The Terrible, Awful Truth About Supplemental Security Income - 0 views

thelastpsychiatrist.com/...rible_awful_truth_about_1.html
shared by anonymous on 11 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Nov 10
     
    "Say you're poor and have never worked. You apply for Welfare/cash payments and state Medicaid. You are obligated to try and find work or be enrolled in a jobs program in order to receive these benefits. But who needs that? Have a doctor fill out a form saying you are Temporarily Incapacitated due to Medical Illness. Yes, just like 3rd grade. The doc will note the diagnosis, however, it doesn't matter what your diagnosis is, it only matters that a doctor says you are Temporarily Incapacitated. So cancer and depression both get you the same benefits." At The Last Psychiatrist on November 11, 2010.
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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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Germany's Geopolitical Opening - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/..._germanys_geopolitical_opening geopolitics germany
shared by anonymous on 10 Nov 10 - Cached
  • Germany is, of course, not like any other country. It was the primary culprit behind the deadliest conflict to ever befall mankind — World War II — and of the greatest state-organized massacre of a single group of people — the Jewish Holocaust. As such, it essentially was forced to give up much of its sovereignty for the next 40 years and to serve as the board for the geopolitical chess match between Washington and Moscow throughout the Cold War.
  • Germany is forcefully defending its interests and national economic strategy ahead of the G-20 summit. The stage is therefore set for a serious disagreement between Washington and the chief trade surplus countries, specifically Germany and China, at the summit. Germany is also beginning to take shots at China, especially for its decision to limit exports of rare earth elements crucial for German industry. These economic disagreements come as Berlin becomes comfortable with its own geopolitical assertiveness. As far as Germany is concerned, it is no longer anybody’s chessboard. It is beginning to see itself as one of the world powers again — with grand strategies, pawns to sacrifice and everything else that goes along with the title of a chess grand master.
  • anonymous on 10 Nov 10
     
    "German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg said on Tuesday that Germans as a nation "must really do something to articulate the relationship between regional security and economic interests without coming to deadlock." Guttenberg cited China's decision to limit rare earth element exports as an example of how competition for resources with the emerging powers could negatively affect Germany's economic well-being. In other words, Guttenberg made a direct link between Berlin's economic and security policies. In any other country such a link is obvious and often reiterated by policymakers, but when German President Horst Koehler expressed similar sentiments in May, he was forced to resign a week later due to criticism that he was overstepping his constitutional bounds (the presidency in Germany is a ceremonial position and one of Europe's constitutionally weakest head-of-state institutions). "
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The Least You Should Know - 0 views

dilbert.com/...the_least_you_should_know criticalthinking
shared by anonymous on 08 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 08 Nov 10
     
    "If you live in the United States, you probably have an opinion on the best way to reduce the deficit. And you probably know almost nothing about the topic. I certainly fall into that category. If you listen to pundits and politicians, you're getting your information from professional liars. If you're reading books, you're getting your information from professional liars who also write well. If you read newspapers and magazines, you're getting only the information that someone has decided will be good for sales. If you say you "do your own research," you're probably a liar, possibly an idiot, and maybe some sort of analytical genius. And frankly, I can't tell you guys apart." By Scott Adams at his blog on November 8, 2010.
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