Ideas

Sitting across the subway from some smug kid with a Nobama button reading a book on dissolving the welfare state, I had a couple ideas today I think might actually be good:

1. We have the most advanced military in the world, and yet we just spent eight years investing heavily in military innovation. How about we put all those projects on hold for one year, offer the employees term jobs in other branches of govt/early retirement/unpaid sabbaticals, and invest the money for one year in something a little more useful? Like a year of job retraining programs.

2. Corporations get stupid tax breaks, even on the federal level where it doesn't do much good in providing incentive to move somewhere. Why not exchange those breaks for new tax breaks that graduate according to the ratio of your highest-paid worker's income vs. your lowest-paid worker's income, to encourage more equitable distribution of wealth?

Science and faith again

I may have to memorize this one so I can trot it out whenever this comes up, because the past couple years of me attempting to articulate it have now all been trumped.

Jerry Coyne is a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, whose religious beliefs were not stated for the article from which I grabbed this. (University Alumni Magazine February 2006, "Beyond Belief: religious U of C students find ways to square conviction with critical thinking.")

"Having [Intelligent Design] in an evolution class would be like including the flood theory or the flat-earth theory in a geology class. ... I don't try to make the literal resolution [between science and Christianity]. We're always changing and growing, and some things are acceptable at different times. Science is a story just like the religious stories. We are trying to find out how things happened biologically and physically. In every age there's a story. ... In many ways it's an act of faith that the rational process will lead men to a higher place. That thesis has never been proven. ... [As for Intelligent Design,] in science there's almost unanimous agreement on what the process is. On the ID side there are 50 to 100 camps who would not agree on the process, what is scripture and what isn't. It's not their career but a belief. ... [The scientific process may] take hundreds of years, but it works."

Quantum perspective

I wrote today:

I've been reading about quantum physics lately, and it's an amazing toy that ALWAYS works, but it's empty of any implications regarding what it actually describes - the nature of reality - and sometimes when I'm reading it seems that the reason it works is because it's a perfectly self-contained and internally consistent descriptive system - it works because it works, not because it's direct observation of a real thing. The way that horoscopes sound excellent, because the way they describe people is distinct and internally consistent and looks productive, but refers to universal traits, so it doesn't necessarily get to the bottom of whatever it is we are in any meaningful way. So I wonder if we obscure underlying reality by describing it in quantum terms, leading us to think about reality in a way that is insightful in a direction AWAY from what things really are. I don't know if that's very clear.

For later

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

So there

Reached by e-mail, Dr. Davies acknowledged that his mailbox was “overflowing with vitriol,” but said he had been misunderstood. What he had wanted to challenge, he said, was not the existence of laws, but the conventional thinking about their source.

There is in fact a kind of chicken-and-egg problem with the universe and its laws. Which “came” first — the laws or the universe?

If the laws of physics are to have any sticking power at all, to be real laws, one could argue, they have to be good anywhere and at any time, including the Big Bang, the putative Creation. Which gives them a kind of transcendent status outside of space and time.

On the other hand, many thinkers — all the way back to Augustine — suspect that space and time, being attributes of this existence, came into being along with the universe — in the Big Bang, in modern vernacular. So why not the laws themselves?

Dr. Davies complains that the traditional view of transcendent laws is just 17th-century monotheism without God. “Then God got killed off and the laws just free-floated in a conceptual vacuum but retained their theological properties,” he said in his e-mail message.


From http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18law.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

Edges again

Rebecca Goldstein, philosopher, novelist and life-partner of Steven Pinker, has this to say about the paranormal:

It could be in the nature of the phenomena that it's extremely difficult to reproduce it in controlled experiments. In which case, we'll never know. I think it's a kind of arrogance to say that our science is complete. It's an amazing thing that we can know as much about the physical world as we do know. Why assume that we know everything about the world that there is to know? We've developed through all sorts of happenstance a kind of methodology that allows us to know a tremendous amount. It's an extraordinary thing that we can test and probe nature. And it's yielded amazing secrets. But why assume that this methodology that we're just damn lucky to have been able to stumble upon is going to yield all secrets? Of course, there could be things beyond the reach of science. But could we have any good evidence for accepting it? As soon as you have good evidence, it becomes science. So can there be good evidence for non-scientific propositions? No. Because the minute there is good evidence, it becomes science.

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/10/15/pinker_goldstein/

Which tidily sums up the limits of science, I think.

Why I Love the Edge

edge.org is occasionally like eavesdropping on my own subconscious.

From a guy named Jonathan Haidt, who maybe I need to go read now:

Morality, Science, Religion and Misunderstanding

It's clear that Richard Dawkins (in The God Delusion) and Sam Harris (in Letter To A Christian Nation) have strong feelings about religion in general and religious fundamentalists in particular. Given the hate mail they receive, I don't blame them. The passions of Dawkins and Harris don't mean that they are wrong, or that they can't be trusted. One can certainly do good scholarship on slavery while hating slavery.

But the presence of passions should alert us that the authors, being human, are likely to have great difficulty searching for and then fairly evaluating evidence that opposes their intuitive feelings about religion. We can turn to Dawkins and Harris to make the case for the prosecution, which they do brilliantly, but if we readers are to judge religion we will have to find a defense attorney. Or at least we'll have to let the accused speak.

This is where the scientific mind is supposed to depart from the lay mind. The normal person (once animated by emotion) engages in moral reasoning to find ammunition, not truth; the normal person attacks the motives and character of her opponents when it will be advantageous to do so. The scientist, in contrast, respects empirical evidence as the ultimate authority and avoids ad hominem arguments. The metaphor for science is a voyage of discovery, not a war. Yet when I read the new atheist books, I see few new shores. Instead I see battlefields strewn with the corpses of straw men....

From Pinker, wonder of wonders:

Words Don't Mean what they Mean

Why don't people just say what they mean? The reason is that conversational partners are not modems downloading information into each other's brains. People are very, very touchy about their relationships. Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity--which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.

...

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world. It's not surprising that we sheathe our words in politeness and innuendo and other forms of doublespeak.