Group items tagged

he and the other authors acknowledged the challenge in gaining traction, even with such findings, given the deep-rooted human bias toward immediate gratification and the development and energy gaps that mean today’s poorer nations have few affordable choices other than fossil fuels. See my recent look at India’s argument for expanded coal use.)

It’s real important to think about these long time scales. Essentially, what our study shows is that the changes that we bring upon within the next decades can really change the face of the Earth for thousands of years to come.

Another aspect to it that really pushes it into our century, or even our decade, is that we are emitting the carbon now and it stays in the atmosphere for a long time and the temperature remains high even longer than the carbon remains high.

In 1954, the Japanese government created the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) in order to alleviate the United States’ burden of ensuring Japan’s security. At the time it argued for interpreting Article 9 (2) as recognizing Japan’s sovereign right to have a small military force. (The Supreme Court supported this reading in a 1959 ruling.) This construction — which has come to be known as the “minimum necessary level” — allowed the establishment of a force to defend Japan within its territory.

amending the Constitution is an onerous process, requiring at least a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Diet and a simple majority in a national referendum. It will also require overcoming the misguided objections of the reflexively antiwar set

Japan now understands that its prosperity and stability depend on global trade and on the peaceful resolution of any disputes. As one of the main beneficiaries of the international liberal order today, Japan is committed to the system — and it is committed to defending it, particularly against rising states like China, which are challenging the status quo

A moderate, sensible revision of the Constitution would be a modest step toward making Japan both a normal country and a more effective protector of the international order — and no less peace-loving.

The bones in its hands and feet are curved, “spitting images” of the toes and finger bones that belonged to the ancient Australopithecus, Piper said. These hominids, such as the 3 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis Lucy, had digits well-suited for climbing.

This species lived at the same time as humans with modern anatomy, who first appeared in the fossil record 200,000 years ago (or perhaps as long as 350,000 years ago). ″We continue to realize that few thousands of years back in time, H. sapiens was definitely not alone on Earth,”

Though these fossils are the oldest in the Philippines, evidence for habitation is even older; 700,000 years ago, ancient butchers on Luzon carved up a rhinoceros with stone tools. Which species did the butchering is unknown.

A few “mammal species you find on Luzon appear to have come from the mainland,” Piper said. The Asian continent is 400 or more miles away through the Luzon strait. But in the Middle Pleistocene, when glacial sheets locked up vast amounts of water, sea levels dropped by as much as 400 feet, Piper said.

“I would just say that when humans could see land or they could smell it or they knew the signs, that birds were coming from it, they sought it out,” he said. “That’s not a Homo sapiens trait. It’s something our ancestors and extinct relatives had.”

The cartoon version of evolution, in which a hunched ape becomes a tall and jaunty biped, suggests a journey with a destination. The reality is messier,

An island’s confines can rapidly spark evolutionary change; Charles Darwin saw this in finches’ beaks.

“Isolation plays games,” Potts said. Homo floresiensis showed anthropologists that an island could be an “odd little laboratory of human evolution,” he said. These bones reinforce that lesson.

“It’s beginning to look like the evolutionary process is really fluid,” Potts said. “And it’s surprising that it is so fluid where each species of Homo may actually be a history or a record.” The result is a fusion of the modern and ancient: molars that could be yours alongside toes with millions-year-old curves.

Fifteen years ago, Hawks said, anthropologists chalked up the worldwide success of Homo sapiens to our modern anatomy. These new discoveries, in far-flung corners, suggest exceptionalism is not built into our brains or skeletons.

“The archaeological record is now showing us that ancient human forms were much more adaptable, and I would say clever, than we imagined,”

“This isn’t ‘Flowers for Algernon,’ where, suddenly, we’re super smart and everyone else in the world is behind us.” Scientists are now plumbing genomes for other clues to Homo sapiens’ survival, looking at our metabolisms or resistance to disease, he said. “I’d say the doors have opened, and we haven’t figured out where they lead.”

In school, one learns about “the scientific method”—usually a straightforward set of steps, along the lines of “ask a question, propose a hypothesis, perform an experiment, analyze the results.”

That method works in the classroom, where students are basically told what questions to pursue. But real scientists must come up with their own questions, finding new routes through a much vaster landscape.

Since science began, there has been disagreement about how those routes are charted. Two twentieth-century philosophers of science, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, are widely held to have offered the best accounts of this process.

For Popper, Strevens writes, “scientific inquiry is essentially a process of disproof, and scientists are the disprovers, the debunkers, the destroyers.” Kuhn’s scientists, by contrast, are faddish true believers who promulgate received wisdom until they are forced to attempt a “paradigm shift”—a painful rethinking of their basic assumptions.

Working scientists tend to prefer Popper to Kuhn. But Strevens thinks that both theorists failed to capture what makes science historically distinctive and singularly effective.

Sometimes they seek to falsify theories, sometimes to prove them; sometimes they’re informed by preëxisting or contextual views, and at other times they try to rule narrowly, based on t

Why do scientists agree to this scheme? Why do some of the world’s most intelligent people sign on for a lifetime of pipetting?

Strevens thinks that they do it because they have no choice. They are constrained by a central regulation that governs science, which he calls the “iron rule of explanation.” The rule is simple: it tells scientists that, “if they are to participate in the scientific enterprise, they must uncover or generate new evidence to argue with”; from there, they must “conduct all disputes with reference to empirical evidence alone.”

, it is “the key to science’s success,” because it “channels hope, anger, envy, ambition, resentment—all the fires fuming in the human heart—to one end: the production of empirical evidence.”

Strevens arrives at the idea of the iron rule in a Popperian way: by disproving the other theories about how scientific knowledge is created.

The problem isn’t that Popper and Kuhn are completely wrong. It’s that scientists, as a group, don’t pursue any single intellectual strategy consistently.

Exploring a number of case studies—including the controversies over continental drift, spontaneous generation, and the theory of relativity—Strevens shows scientists exerting themselves intellectually in a variety of ways, as smart, ambitious people usually do.

“Science is boring,” Strevens writes. “Readers of popular science see the 1 percent: the intriguing phenomena, the provocative theories, the dramatic experimental refutations or verifications.” But, he says,behind these achievements . . . are long hours, days, months of tedious laboratory labor. The single greatest obstacle to successful science is the difficulty of persuading brilliant minds to give up the intellectual pleasures of continual speculation and debate, theorizing and arguing, and to turn instead to a life consisting almost entirely of the production of experimental data.

Ultimately, in fact, it was good that the geologists had a “splendid variety” of somewhat arbitrary opinions: progress in science requires partisans, because only they have “the motivation to perform years or even decades of necessary experimental work.” It’s just that these partisans must channel their energies into empirical observation. The iron rule, Strevens writes, “has a valuable by-product, and that by-product is data.”

Science is often described as “self-correcting”: it’s said that bad data and wrong conclusions are rooted out by other scientists, who present contrary findings. But Strevens thinks that the iron rule is often more important than overt correction.

Eddington was never really refuted. Other astronomers, driven by the iron rule, were already planning their own studies, and “the great preponderance of the resulting measurements fit Einsteinian physics better than Newtonian physics.” It’s partly by generating data on such a vast scale, Strevens argues, that the iron rule can power science’s knowledge machine: “Opinions converge not because bad data is corrected but because it is swamped.”

Why did the iron rule emerge when it did? Strevens takes us back to the Thirty Years’ War, which concluded with the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648. The war weakened religious loyalties and strengthened national ones.

Two regimes arose: in the spiritual realm, the will of God held sway, while in the civic one the decrees of the state were paramount. As Isaac Newton wrote, “The laws of God & the laws of man are to be kept distinct.” These new, “nonoverlapping spheres of obligation,” Strevens argues, were what made it possible to imagine the iron rule. The rule simply proposed the creation of a third sphere: in addition to God and state, there would now be science.

Strevens imagines how, to someone in Descartes’s time, the iron rule would have seemed “unreasonably closed-minded.” Since ancient Greece, it had been obvious that the best thinking was cross-disciplinary, capable of knitting together “poetry, music, drama, philosophy, democracy, mathematics,” and other elevating human disciplines.

We’re still accustomed to the idea that a truly flourishing intellect is a well-rounded one. And, by this standard, Strevens says, the iron rule looks like “an irrational way to inquire into the underlying structure of things”; it seems to demand the upsetting “suppression of human nature.”

Descartes, in short, would have had good reasons for resisting a law that narrowed the grounds of disputation, or that encouraged what Strevens describes as “doing rather than thinking.”

In fact, the iron rule offered scientists a more supple vision of progress. Before its arrival, intellectual life was conducted in grand gestures.

Descartes’s book was meant to be a complete overhaul of what had preceded it; its fate, had science not arisen, would have been replacement by some equally expansive system. The iron rule broke that pattern.

by authorizing what Strevens calls “shallow explanation,” the iron rule offered an empirical bridge across a conceptual chasm. Work could continue, and understanding could be acquired on the other side. In this way, shallowness was actually more powerful than depth.

it also changed what counted as progress. In the past, a theory about the world was deemed valid when it was complete—when God, light, muscles, plants, and the planets cohered. The iron rule allowed scientists to step away from the quest for completeness.

The consequences of this shift would become apparent only with time

In 1713, Isaac Newton appended a postscript to the second edition of his “Principia,” the treatise in which he first laid out the three laws of motion and the theory of universal gravitation. “I have not as yet been able to deduce from phenomena the reason for these properties of gravity, and I do not feign hypotheses,” he wrote. “It is enough that gravity really exists and acts according to the laws that we have set forth.”

What mattered, to Newton and his contemporaries, was his theory’s empirical, predictive power—that it was “sufficient to explain all the motions of the heavenly bodies and of our sea.”

Descartes would have found this attitude ridiculous. He had been playing a deep game—trying to explain, at a fundamental level, how the universe fit together. Newton, by those lights, had failed to explain anything: he himself admitted that he had no sense of how gravity did its work

Strevens sees its earliest expression in Francis Bacon’s “The New Organon,” a foundational text of the Scientific Revolution, published in 1620. Bacon argued that thinkers must set aside their “idols,” relying, instead, only on evidence they could verify. This dictum gave scientists a new way of responding to one another’s work: gathering data.

Quantum theory—which tells us that subatomic particles can be “entangled” across vast distances, and in multiple places at the same time—makes intuitive sense to pretty much nobody.

Without the iron rule, Strevens writes, physicists confronted with such a theory would have found themselves at an impasse. They would have argued endlessly about quantum metaphysics.

ollowing the iron rule, they can make progress empirically even though they are uncertain conceptually. Individual researchers still passionately disagree about what quantum theory means. But that hasn’t stopped them from using it for practical purposes—computer chips, MRI machines, G.P.S. networks, and other technologies rely on quantum physics.

One group of theorists, the rationalists, has argued that science is a new way of thinking, and that the scientist is a new kind of thinker—dispassionate to an uncommon degree.

As evidence against this view, another group, the subjectivists, points out that scientists are as hopelessly biased as the rest of us. To this group, the aloofness of science is a smoke screen behind which the inevitable emotions and ideologies hide.

At least in science, Strevens tells us, “the appearance of objectivity” has turned out to be “as important as the real thing.”

The subjectivists are right, he admits, inasmuch as scientists are regular people with a “need to win” and a “determination to come out on top.”

But they are wrong to think that subjectivity compromises the scientific enterprise. On the contrary, once subjectivity is channelled by the iron rule, it becomes a vital component of the knowledge machine. It’s this redirected subjectivity—to come out on top, you must follow the iron rule!—that solves science’s “problem of motivation,” giving scientists no choice but “to pursue a single experiment relentlessly, to the last measurable digit, when that digit might be quite meaningless.”

If it really was a speech code that instigated “the extraordinary attention to process and detail that makes science the supreme discriminator and destroyer of false ideas,” then the peculiar rigidity of scientific writing—Strevens describes it as “sterilized”—isn’t a symptom of the scientific mind-set but its cause.

The iron rule—“a kind of speech code”—simply created a new way of communicating, and it’s this new way of communicating that created science.

Other theorists have explained science by charting a sweeping revolution in the human mind; inevitably, they’ve become mired in a long-running debate about how objective scientists really are

In “The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science” (Liveright), Michael Strevens, a philosopher at New York University, aims to identify that special something. Strevens is a philosopher of science

Compared with the theories proposed by Popper and Kuhn, Strevens’s rule can feel obvious and underpowered. That’s because it isn’t intellectual but procedural. “The iron rule is focused not on what scientists think,” he writes, “but on what arguments they can make in their official communications.”

Like everybody else, scientists view questions through the lenses of taste, personality, affiliation, and experience

geologists had a professional obligation to take sides. Europeans, Strevens reports, tended to back Wegener, who was German, while scholars in the United States often preferred Simpson, who was American. Outsiders to the field were often more receptive to the concept of continental drift than established scientists, who considered its incompleteness a fatal flaw.

Strevens’s point isn’t that these scientists were doing anything wrong. If they had biases and perspectives, he writes, “that’s how human thinking works.”

Eddington’s observations were expected to either confirm or falsify Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which predicted that the sun’s gravity would bend the path of light, subtly shifting the stellar pattern. For reasons having to do with weather and equipment, the evidence collected by Eddington—and by his colleague Frank Dyson, who had taken similar photographs in Sobral, Brazil—was inconclusive; some of their images were blurry, and so failed to resolve the matter definitively.

it was only natural for intelligent people who were free of the rule’s strictures to attempt a kind of holistic, systematic inquiry that was, in many ways, more demanding. It never occurred to them to ask if they might illuminate more collectively by thinking about less individually.

In the single-sphered, pre-scientific world, thinkers tended to inquire into everything at once. Often, they arrived at conclusions about nature that were fascinating, visionary, and wrong.

How Does Science Really Work?Science is objective. Scientists are not. Can an “iron rule” explain how they’ve changed the world anyway?By Joshua RothmanSeptember 28, 2020

Most investors regard Warren Buffett as someone who has parlayed brilliant analysis, hard work and extensive connections into one of the best track records in financial history. Mr. Housel, however, notices that Mr. Buffett accrued at least 95% of his wealth after age 65.

Had Mr. Buffett earned his world-beating returns for only 30 years rather than much longer, he would be worth 99.9% less, notes Mr. Housel. “The real key to his success is that he’s been a phenomenal investor for three quarters of a century,” he writes of Mr. Buffett. “His skill is investing, but his secret is time.”

So Mr. Buffett—traditionally viewed as the greatest living example of investing skill—is also proof of the power of luck and longevity.

In a similar vein, “The Psychology of Money” argues the biggest determinant of long-term returns often happens to be when you were born. Adjusted for inflation, people born in 1950 earned essentially nothing in the stock market between the ages of 13 and 30, Mr. Housel shows. Those born in 1970 earned roughly nine times as much on stocks in their formative years. Those born in 2000? They may have to save a lot more than their parents did.

Bubbles form when catchy stories and the human need for imitation and conformity turn investing into a social imperative.

Mr. Housel urges investors to think about what money and wealth are for. He draws a critical distinction between being rich (having a high current income) and being wealthy (having the freedom to choose not to spend money).

Many rich people aren’t wealthy, Mr. Housel argues, because they feel the need to spend a lot of money to show others how rich they are

He defines the optimal savings level as “the gap between your ego and your income.” Wealth consists in caring less about what others think about you and more about using your money to control how you spend your time.

He writes: “The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who[m] you want, for as long as you want to, pays the highest dividend that exists in finance.”

Worldwide fossil fuel emissions are expected to be up 0.6% in 2019 over 2018, according to projections from the Global Carbon Project. In the past decade, humans have put more than 350 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels and other industrial processes, according to calculations provided by the World Resources Institute.

Meanwhile, scientists are becoming even more concerned about tipping points in the climate system that could lead to rapid rise in sea levels, the deterioration of the Amazon and so on. One particularly frightening commentary last month in the journal Nature, by several notable climate scientists, says the odds we can avoid tipping points in the climate system "could already have shrunk towards zero." In non-science-speak: We're there now.

This was the decade when some people finally started to see the climate crisis as personal. Climate attribution science, which looks for human fingerprints on extreme weather events, made its way into the popular imagination. We're starting to realize there are no truly "natural" disasters anymore. We've warmed the climate, and we're already making storms riskier.

The news media is picking that up, using terms such as "climate emergency" and "climate crisis" instead of the blander "climate change." Increasingly, lots of people are making these critical connections, which should motivate the political, social and economic revolution necessary to fix things.

Only 52% of American adults say they are "very" or "extremely" sure global warming is happening, according to a report from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, which is based on a 1,303 person survey conducted in November 2019. Yale's been asking that question for a while now. Go back a decade, to 2009, and the rate is about the same: 51%.

The bright spot -- and it truly is a bright one -- is that young people are waking up. They are shouting, loudly and with purpose. Witness Greta Thunberg, the dynamic teenager who started a one-girl protest outside the Swedish Parliament last year, demanding that adults take seriously this emergency, which threatens young people and future generations disproportionately.

New financial constraints on family formation are a potential cause, as implied by another striking finding in the Journal poll — 78 percent of adults lack confidence this generation of children will enjoy a better life than they do.

Yet a recent analysis for the Aspen Economic Strategy Group by Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine, economics professors at the University of Maryland and Wellesley College, respectively, determined that “beyond the temporary effects of the Great Recession, no recent economic or policy change is responsible for a meaningful share of the decline in the US fertility rate since 2007.”

Their study took account of such factors as the high cost of child care, student debt service and housing as well as Medicaid coverage and the wider availability of long-acting reversible contraception. Yet they had “no success finding evidence” that any of these were decisive.

Kearney and Levine speculated instead that the answers lie in the cultural zeitgeist — “shifting priorities across cohorts of young adults,”

A possibility worth considering, they suggested, is that young adults who experienced “intensive parenting” as children now balk at the heavy investment of time and resources needed to raise their own kids that way: It would clash with their career and leisure goals.

another event that year: Apple released the first iPhone, a revolutionary cultural moment if there ever was one. The ensuing smartphone-enabled social media boom — Facebook had opened membership to anyone older than 13 in 2006 — forever changed how human beings relate with one another.

We are just beginning to understand this development’s effect on mental health, education, religious observance, community cohesion — everything. Why wouldn’t it also affect people’s willingness to have children?

one indirect way new media affect childbearing rates is through “time competition effects” — essentially, hours spent watching the tube cannot be spent forming romantic partnerships.

a 2021 review of survey data on young adults and adolescents in the United States and other countries, the years between 2009 and 2018 saw a marked decline in reported sexual activity.

the authors hypothesized that people are distracted from the search for partners by “increasing use of computer games and social media.

during the late 20th century, Brazil’s fertility rates fell after women who watched soap operas depicting smaller families sought to emulate them by having fewer children themselves.

This may be an area where incentives do not influence behavior, at least not enough. Whether the cultural shift to lower birthrates occurs on an accelerated basis, as in the United States after 2007, or gradually, as it did in Japan, it appears permanent — “sticky,” as policy wonks say.