Blogs you need to know about

I write a blog about things I think are annoying. It's included topics like Amy Schumer, the fact that people still say "bye Felicia," and people who refer to themselves as intellectual.

Res Annoying 

http://resannoying.tumblr.com

And our cat writes a blog about living with us. 

barnabyscatblog

https://barnabyscatblog.wordpress.com

Useless Gun Post

We don't have any way of saying whether or not carrying a gun makes you safer, or prevents (slows, stops) mass shootings, etc. 

The best we can manage is either tapping our forefinger against our chin, checking our gut instincts and offering a yay or nay, in which case if I say Yay and you say Nay, we're again at an impasse, and that didn't help us at all; OR we can point to cases where a person used their weapon to "prevent" (more about "prevent" later) a bad thing and say "SEE?" And the problem here is, well, it's anecdotal. And because we don't and can't have all of the data from all of the events of this type, or even a representative sample of the data, we can't say for certain if this case is an outlier, or part of a general trend. Of course, for public relations it's an entirely different matter. But we're not interested in merely creating an impression of legitimacy, are we? We want to be able to say, to the best of our ability, whether or not we're any safer. And to do that we need data.

But before we get data, we need to clean up some definitions. "Safer", for example, is a pretty nebulous term. For example, say in the data we found that with guns, there is a 10% decrease in the likelihood of death, but a 30% increase in the likelihood of injury. Is that acceptable? Is death the only thing we're interested in? Either way we hash it out, we need to say explicitly ahead of time how we're measuring or we'll only be drawing a circle around the data that seems to support our own biased position and saying we proved it, not unlike the anecdotal case above.

Also, safer for whom? Are we interested in self-protection only, or the protection of others as well? Clearly the answer to that question will change the way we look at data.

Also, "prevent" is a tricky word. It suggests we're stopping people before they start. That either means a stare down with nothing happening afterwards, or it means shooting people in cold blood. Presumably no one would advocate shooting in cold blood. So we would probably want to look at stopping or slowing down a shooter. Here the problem is we have to enter the weird world of counterfactuals: what would have happened, or what could have happened, i.e. What did happen in the possible world where there was no intervention. We don't have access to that information, because that information doesn't actually exist. We can speculate, but this will lead to estimation, and estimation is heavily subject to bias. (Suppose your hypothesis is that guns do not make anyone safer and you estimate the "could have killed" number at 5, whereas my hypothesis is that guns do make you safer, and I estimate the "could have killed" number at 100). Perhaps I interpret a (relatively) innocuous bar fight as a potential mass shooting (ahem), or you interpret a mass shooting a several distinct separate incidents. Clearly our beliefs will taint our analysis.

And lastly, we need to count everyone who was there. This probably seems obvious, but in detail it gets tricky. Suppose there is a shooting in a mall where there are 5000 people. 10 die, 20 are wounded. We need to know about the other 4970 people. How many of them are carrying weapons? How can we get that information? Are we considering them to be participants or not? Are they causal factors in determining safety rates? This is important because if it turns out that in most cases there are other gun-carriers present who did nothing/ran away, their protect-self rates would be high, while their protect-other rates would be no impact. 

Now suppose it is a mall (not a ticketed event where we can get an attendance figure) and we just don't have a good way of knowing how many people are present. Again, the estimation bias issue creeps back in. How many others we estimate will impact ratios, as above. 

I say all this not to say we shouldn't research these things. We obviously should. Just because something is tricky doesn't mean it should be avoided. I simply mean to point out that if you think the evidence clearly supports your position, whatever your position is, you are grossly over-estimating the evidence that's available. 

If we talked about the NCAA like we talk about anything else

Actual Story: School A beat School B 102-81.

News Story: "School A and School B played each other today. We'll give each school the same amount of airtime to state why they won. You can weigh in on who won on our Facebook page."

Facebook Story: 

"Free throws cause autism!"

     "No they don't!"

     "We need to study whether they do better!"

"In 1992 someone from School B said something bad."

"The troops go to School A"

"The troops go to School B"

"School A contains ingredients I don't know what they are!"

     "If we don't know what it is, it's probably scary!"

"Hitler would support School A!"

"Hitler would support School B!"

"I don't believe in School B, and I shouldn't have to acknowledge that it exists."

"The troops go to School B."

     "They go to School A, too!"

"What are you all talking about? The score was 102-81. End of discussion. There's no argument to be had!"

     "Shut up, nerd!"

     "You're an elitist!"

     "You're trying to take away my right to free speech!"

Rightness and Popularity are independent of one another

Lately I've been thinking about the old adage "What is popular is not always right, and what is right is not always popular," which is true I think. 

The problem I have with it is that it doesn't give you any clues about whether or not you are right. Some may think, indeed evidently some do think, that unpopularity is itself a sign of rightness. Which doesn't follow at all, as I will endeavor to show by and by.

Some may also understand the adage to mean "stand up for what you believe in, irrespective of popularity." Again, this is unhelpful. What you believe may be wrong. How do you tell?

An extreme version of this adage I read in an article about the Westboro Baptist Church. "If you are doing all the right things the world will hate you. The world hates us. So, we must be doing something right."

This is a very simple argument as far as its logical components go: we have two premises and a conclusion, and I can tell you straightaway the argument is invalid. But let's prove it. (What follows will seem awfully pedestrian to anyone who's ever taken a 100-level Logic course).

First let's remove the content. It's irrelevant anyway. Because once we reveal that the logical structure is bad, the argument will be bad no matter what content we replace it with. 

We'll replace "You are doing the right things" with "A", and "The world hates you" with "B". Then replace them in each occurrence in the argument . We're left with:

If A then B.

B

Therefore A

Logicians among you will recognize the formal fallacy immediately. To reveal it to the rest of us, all we have to is find suitable replacement sentences for A and B. So let's use the legendary thoroughbred Seabiscuit. Who we all acknowledge is a horse, I hope.

Let A= Seabiscuit is a cat, and B = Seabiscuit is a mammal. 

Now we have "if Seabiscuit is a cat, then Seabiscuit is a mammal." It may seem odd to say, but this is True. If he were a cat, he'd be a mammal.

We also have "Seabiscuit is a mammal" this is true, too. Horses are mammals.

And the conclusion "Seabiscuit is a cat." Which we all know is false.

Now the definition of a valid argument is that if all the premises are true, the conclusion must be true, and yet here we have two true premises and a false conclusion. This is an invalid argument structure. Which means both our dreamed-up argument and the one from the WBC are invalid. And it would still be invalid if all the sentences were true: if Barnaby is a Cat, he is a mammal. Barnaby is a mammal, therefore he is a Cat. All of that is true, but the argument is still invalid, because the conditional arrow flows in one direction (from being a cat to being a mammal), not in the other. He is not a cat due to being a mammal, he's a mammal due to being a cat.

So, rightness is independent of popularity, or indeed hatred. Which is why I think the old adage is true. What is popular is not always right. But what is popular is not always wrong, either. And since popularity and rightness are independent of one another, we must look for other, more accurate criteria.

Bigotry, Definitions, and Point-Scoring

Let's just say racism, there are a host of analogous forms of bigotry, but let's start there. I think it's a safe assumption that we all agree racism is a problem. Even people who do racist things are quick to say, "It's not racist." That seems to me to be a small piece of evidence that suggests maybe we all do. 

I'm sure, if I scramble, I can find a few fringe people out there who are proud to be labelled racist, but I'm going to act under the assumption that's a very small minority, and for the purposes I'm after at the moment, a negligible one.

So we all agree racism is a problem. That must mean that, if it's possible to eliminate, we'd all think the world would be a better place without it. So, what might eliminating racism look like?

That's where it all goes to hell. The answers to that question are myriad, and they're all predicated of diverging concepts of what racism is. We don't, I sure hope, want to claim that racism is subjective or relativized. We'd rather all be talking about the same thing. But it isn't sufficiently clear that we are. 

Let me give a wild, beetle-in-the-box example to exaggerate what I mean. If I idiosyncratically call roses "baseball games", and you are unaware of this idiosyncrasy, we might get into a very serious argument about whether or not I saw a dozen baseball games in a vase.

What we think the meaning of the word is has huge impacts on what we think should be done if we want to eliminate the phenomenon, just as we might have radically different strategies if we both want to eliminate baseball games. 

So my first point is that we'd better be clear what we're talking about.

My second point is, I hope, a bit broader.

Whatever we think racism is, we must at least acknowledge that it involves very deep-seated, engrained attitudes about people, some we might not even be aware of consciously. These kinds of attitudes do not simply fall off overnight. It requires years (decades? generations?) to identify and acknowledge them, confront them, deal with them, eliminate them. A well-crafted pithy jab simply isn't up to the task. 

And here's where I hope to get broader: the idea that there's an Us and a Them, and that by making these little jabs at Them will "take down" those views we find so contrary to our own doesn't just miss the point. It's positively counterproductive. Across the spectrum--Us and Them--there is work to be done sniffing out these attitudes in ourselves and setting to work on them. Point-scoring does nothing to aid this process, it causes us to bury these attitudes even deeper. It polarizes the conversation and pushes diverging points of view to unnecessary extremes. It prevents the process. 

(I would say something similar about political discourse. Then again, one could argue that toeing the party line is another form of bigotry).

I don't have a nice clean solution to conclude with, because that's the nature of the thing. To assume otherwise is dangerous and arrogant. However, Voltaire does come to mind: "Il faut cultiver notre jardin."

"What kind of music do you like?"

It's over complicated to answer this question. It is for me, it is for you. No one treats it that way, and I don't know why not. 

Firstly, the idea of genrefication in music is pretty problematic. I can't make it make sense to say there are two artists in the same genre, barring some very general similarities or pretty general differences. There are general sounds, I suppose, but one artist can shift and re-shape, morph, bend, break, invent, etc all within the same genre, so that what is at one end of the spectrum, while ostensibly the same genre, has very little in common with what's at the other end.

Really all a genre name is meant to do is simplify out all of those little complexities: to find a way of talking about music while also ignoring every one of its interesting features. It is unhelpful shorthand. 

On the other hand, to dig into all of the fine-grained distinctions, multiply our genre lexicon to the extent that it would be able to handle all of those distinctions would also be unhelpful, because no one would know what anyone else was talking about. Setting up those genre lines would be just as nebulous as not setting them up: ask two country music fans what "real country" is, and you'll get three different answers, each of them supposed to mean "this is definitional of the genre", but actually just means "this is something I like".

In short, the genre game is just nonsense.

But Secondly, I don't pay much attention to genre anyway. I don't mean to say I have "eclectic" tastes, that's just as unhelpful and obnoxious as anything else. What matters to me most is lyrics, what they're about, how they're phrased. Whether or not I'm hearing something put in a way I've never heard it put before, etc. Individual people are "better" or "worse" at that (this is subjective, I just mean I like it more or less), and they're spread out all over. It's not eclectic, it's really only one thing I like. That one thing just doesn't map at all onto the concept of genre.

So is this a reasonable answer to the question?

Well, yes and no. It adequately answers what I'm looking for (I think), but that isn't what's being asked for is it?

Because, Thirdly, this question only exists to weasel the shorthand genre answer out of someone, not because that's helpful. It isn't. It's so that we can use this (non-)information to make character assessments of other people. It's to decide if you and I belong to the same category, and if we do, we can be friends, and if not it's going to be rocky. 

Based on practically no information at all!

It's amazing to me that anyone ever has friends.

Over-Simplifying doesn't give anyone's opinions legitimacy

Sometimes we like to discredit things, and we frame our discrediting with clear indicative phrases like "that's just...", "nothing more than...", "all that is...", etc.

Often, these indicative phrases not only indicate an ensuing discredit statement, but also indicate a massive over-simplification. 

An easy example is basketball: "That's just people putting a leather ball through an iron hoop." 

No. No it isn't. Basketball is significantly more complex than that, it has rules, strategies, actions, leagues, organizations, endorsement deals, scholarships, etc., all of which are left out of the above appraisal. 

That phenomenon, basketball, hasn't remotely been discredited, because it hasn't remotely been described. 

Has anything been discredited? I'm tempted to say the speaker, but that is yet another oversimplification. The statement simply discredits itself. 

What's frustrating about this kind of maneuver is it's ubiquity--anything can be incompletely described in such a way. 

Am I currently writing a blog post, or am I "just" touching the screen of my phone over and over?

I am touching the screen of my phone over and over, but (hopefully) it's evident that more than that is going on.

Is reading a book "just" looking at ink and paper?

Is building a house "just" swinging a hammer at some wood?

Is a family reunion "just" a bunch of people in the same place?

You get the idea. I hope. 

I think the reason we do this is to try to fortify subjective preferences with "objective" reasoning. We like our opinions, and we'd like other people to share them. But, there's really no reason why they should. Opinions are things we like, things we don't like, personal tastes, and so on. They are not facts. Facts are features of the world, which we all share in common. Fail to deal with them, and you are, in a very important sense, ignoring the world. Opinions are features of our own individual mental landscapes, which no one else shares in common. Why should anyone else have to deal with them?

So if we could give factual reasons to support mere opinions, our opinions take on an external authority that we, as well as our peers, must bow to.

But we can't give factual reasons to support opinions. We can explain them using facts : "I was forced to listen to this song as a child while my parents stole my money." But that's hardly the same thing. 

It doesn't make sense to say opinions are "better" or "worse", they are just different. Oversimplification is one way of attempting to make an opinion appear "better", but as we have seen, it fails.

More than that, it shuts the door to other experiential possibilities: if we write categories of human endeavor wholesale (no matter what the reason might be) we, ipso facto, preventing ourselves from experiencing them. That's fine sometimes, when there are good reasons. I'd very much like to preclude myself from being involved in a murder. Ending a life causes suffering. 

However, if I preclude myself from experiencing jazz because it's "just a lot of chaotic noise", I might be preventing myself from having an experience of something I later find out I really enjoy. 

On the other hand, if I'm honest and say something like, "I just can't get into it, it's not for me." I've kept my comments about my own subjective states, and haven't implied that the jazz musician sitting next to me is completely wasting his time. 

Beatles Fans: I Am Not Informed

Look, there is absolutely nothing wrong with liking the Beatles. There's something a little wrong with telling people you like the Beatles. Telling people you don't like them is a bit of a head scratcher, but more of that later. 

They, the Beatles (and then I promise I'll stop over-using their name), were great by any account: record sales, influence, sound, innovation, catchiness...on and on and on. People love them. They have done for fifty years. 

So, when I say it's a little wrong to say you like them what I mean is this: of course you do. Why are you wasting part of my finite existence with this useless bit of non-information? Literally non-information: I am not informed of anything. 

It'd be different if it was something a bit offbeat or sub-pop like Star Wars (although, for similar reasons, YAWN!) that only 90% of the population likes. But even then, what am I informed of, really?

Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with liking these things. 

It's just a real conversation killer when you say something as ubiquitous as "I like air." 

What should the next line in the conversation be? What can it be? 

Now, if you say you don't like the Beatles, you might have something tremendously interesting to say in the way of an explanation: you have issues with their lyrical content, their song structure, something along those lines. That's a fine and informative thing to say.

However, if you don't like them "because they're so overrated", then please, hit yourself in the face with a frying pan. (Because NOT hitting yourself in the face with a frying pan is so overrated). 

No, but seriously, are all of your opinions dictated by other people's opinions? Always doing the opposite of "what everyone does" isn't any more interesting than just going along. Only in this case, it isn't that your own view is uninteresting per se, it's that you don't have your own view. You are just a reflection off of everything else. What use is that?

(Being useful is overrated)

(Sorry, I couldn't resist)

One way I made my workday more fun

Edit: apparently this blog decided it would be cool to resize my images below so that you can't see all of the interesting or relevant parts of the images....but I can see them....I'm leaving them in though. So you can share my frustration.

I use a spreadsheet all day every day at work that, really, no one else sees. Its a daily log that i clear out at the end of each day. It's boring. 

So I decided to give myself a little encouragement and enjoyment throughout the day in a non-predictable pattern, because everything else on my sheet is boring day after day. Here's what I did:

In this bright yellow box on the right (j3:k6), I have a randomly-generated message. That message is pulled from a bank on a separate sheet (in my case I named that other sheet "Text").

My formula has two ranges it pulls from. Column B has salutary, "Good Morning" type messages (you'll see how I used them here in a minute, and column A has all the other messages. 

So, if a2 is blank, which, after the column heading is my first job position, then the cell is blank, otherwise, if the second job position is blank (a3), that is, after the first job but before the second, it pulls a message from column B on the "Text" sheet. Otherwise, that is, if a2 and a3 are neither one blank, it pulls a message from column A.

Now the randomizing bit is there, and it's pretty simple: 

Say your list of cells you want to randomly display is a1:a5, then your function would be:

=index(a1:a5, rand()*rows(a1:a5)+1)

North Sea Oil Figures and Scottish Independence

We're well over a year from the 2014 referendum on Scotland's independence (in fact it was announced today that the date will be 18 September), but already debate is raging, and I am fascinated. As an American, I have no horse in this race, and I can't really say which outcome I'd like to see (not that it would matter much to anyone if I did). If I'm being honest, I'd have to say I like the romanticized notion of an independent Scotland. However, the issues, when you begin to investigate them, are complex, and thus the decision Scotland must now make is not so clear-cut. I intend to write more about it, but I'm starting with just one portion of the debate, because of concerns about the length of my posts. I'm hoping, by the way, to be corrected on anything I've said here that may be wrong, misguided, or just plain stupid. If you have a concern, let me have it!

One key piece of the debate is how the new nation can fare economically. And no small part of determining that question is to determine what future revenues from North Sea oil will be. To that end projections have been made. Now, this becomes a problem very quickly. On the one hand because predicting the economic future is fraught with all kinds of problems, but more importantly for the present purpose: two radically different projections have emerged. One projection, endorsed and used by the No Campaign, is perhaps unfairly pessimistic, which, of course, supports their political cause. And one projection, endorsed and used by the Yes Campaign, is perhaps unfairly optimistic, which, of course supports their political cause.

This issue is obviously of vital importance to Scotland, because how well the new country would be able to support itself is paramount in deciding whether to choose independence and manage this revenue alone, or to remain part of the UK if there isn't going to be enough to run the government. Clearly it is important, but not, I don't think, particularly helpful.

The reason I don't think it is helpful is, for one thing, the difference between the numbers means that it's very likely that one or both of them is flawed. Another reason, which to be honest is more suspicion than anything, is that these figures won't change anyone's mind anyway.

With respect to this first point, that it's very likely that one or both of these numbers is flawed, well, it might be interesting in a gossip column kind of way to follow the money trail behind these two figures and the organizations that produced them and find evidence of profound bias or even corruption. That may well happen anyway. Even if it does happen, it doesn't help anything. It doesn't answer the real questions about what the real state of affairs with North Sea oil will be, or what the Scottish voters should decide on referendum day. The most that it should bring about is to make figures within the debate look untrustworthy. That is not the same thing at all as deciding the issue (though obviously it could have an effect when votes are cast. That is the unfortunate difference between what is and what ought to be).

Regarding that second point, that these figures won't persuade anyone: this is a fear I'm carrying with me as part of my American baggage: people will only pay attention to the facts that it is convenient to pay attention to, and when compelled to pay attention to inconvenient facts, they rework them to fit their existing narrative. The result of this is a breakdown of discourse. We can't have a meaningful discussion about something, if we can't agree on what the something we're discussing is to begin with. We have to at least be talking in the same reality.

If that explanation of why I don't think it will be persuasive is itself too speculative to be persuasive, here's an alternative reason for thinking so, at least for now: we don't yet know in detail what the nature of the new government will be and how much will be "enough" to run it, what sources the revenue could come from, etc. in order to know which point the number must be above in order for a Yes vote to not be irresponsible. That is the key: having defined Yes/No parameters, that is whenever it is appropriate to discuss the future of oil prices.

It avoids the more fundamental question, though, which is this: if all of the concerns were addressed to everyone's satisfaction, then should Scotland become an independent state? In other words, does the outcome of oil revenue determine the entire thing? It's a much more difficult question. It is THE question. But I think framing it in these terms gives undecideds a groundwork for making a decision.

Site recommendation: Nizkor

Nizkor is a site dedicated to educating about the holocaust and combating hatred. They offer a great many resources, free educational materials, and so forth. I'm particularly happy that they also offer a list of informal argumentative fallacies: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/index.html#index

Why People are so Nasty to One Another About What they Decide to Post Online

Here's how it happens:

Level 1: for a while people just post whatever they like onto the Internet, right? Because it's so vast, and so many people partake in its vastness, trends emerge in the ways people use the Internet to express themselves. These trends expand. People start to notice the trends. People start to get annoyed by the trends. Then:

Level 2: People start mocking the trends, calling out the internet cliches. But again, the Internet is vast. Trends emerge in mocking Internet trends, which people begin to notice and get annoyed by. Then:

Level 3: People start mocking the people who are mocking the initial trends....
&c.

Listen: just chill out, people. Stop depriving yourself and others of joy by heap commentary on top of commentary. Quit repeating things until they appear meaningless. Try to remember there's another person on the other side of that post with real emotions and personal issues. And most importantly: ignore me entirely.

Come to Indiana!

Workplace Tips for Being Funny & Making Everyone Love You

1) Be Sarcastic
They say sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but you don't care about that, do you? Your coworkers are idiots, I know. Besides, the lowest form of wit is still wit, right?
Here's a classic: When someone accuses you of being sarcastic say, "I don't even know what sarcasm means," but, and here's the key, when you say it, say it sarcastically. Master this, and you've got the comedic Midas Touch, my friend.

2) "That's what she said."
Use it! No one has ever gotten tired of this, despite our best attempts to kill it, so use it often. One TWSS per six sentences is the ideal ratio.

3) LOLcats
If the Internet has taught us anything, it's that people find misspelled words in inappropriate grammatical constructions to be adorable. Mimic this idiotic trend. It might not be funny, but it will make everyone everywhere love you for always.

4) Arbitrarily Insult
This is dangerous. Some coworkers report things to HR, and some carry guns. Use with extreme caution.
Now, everyone has something slightly odd about them. Find that thing about someone, exaggerate it, and mock it. If you smile when you say it, people will be okay with it. Once that happens you will be allowed to say oddly malicious things at work with impunity.

5) Mock Your Superiors
Listen: you aren't the only one with an unwarranted belief that you deserve a promotion. Yes, everyone is just as delusional as you are. Mocking your boss taps into these feelings, making your coworkers laugh, and making them like you. That's a double whammy.

6) Fake Inability to Hear
If the subject of not being able to hear something comes up, ALWAYS say "huh?" or "what?" This is the evergreen of workplace comedy.
If you have an accomplice, one of you can say "Come again?" and the other can say, "That's what she said." Another double whammy!

7) Respond to Someone Who is On the Phone
Easy to start, but hard to maintain. When someone answers their phone, "Hello," say back to them, "Hello" and continue interacting with them. This will require some improvisation, but the comedic benefits will outweigh the risk of failure, particularly if you are able to completely derail the other person's conversation.

8) Send New People to Look for Equipment That Doesn't Exist
"This memo is too long. I need the paper stretcher to make it all fit on one page." Need I say more?

9) Forward Hilarious Emails Other Comedic Gurus Send You
You can't always appear to come up with things on your own, but you can show your coworkers just how good your taste is.

10) Be Arrogant
Respond to every compliment with "I know."

11) Make Lopsided Lists
Never end a list of anything on an even multiple of five.

Stand Up Appearances 9.25-10.1.110

Hi folks!
I figured I'd post a list of upcoming stand up shows/open mics I'm participating in for this coming week. I'm gonna try and keep this up, so check back.

9.25 Louisville Comedy Underground 9pm $? The Bard's Town
9.27 Bard's Town Variety Shack 8pm FREE The Bard's Town
9.28 Caravan RAW 8pm $3 Comedy Caravan
9.30 The Young, Dumb, and Full of Comedy Show (on the spot competition) 9:30pm $3 The Bard's Town

(all of these are in Louisville, for the unaware).

Sorry to be so self-promotional, but it's a blog. I mean, isn't the point to blather incessantly about yourself and your ideas?

My Facts Trump Your Facts

Here's a relatively simple example of a big problem we have to deal with in some way: Sarah Palin misquotes a Wall Street Journal story to back up her earlier incorrect analysis of grocery store prices.

The actual details of the story aren't all that exciting. She said in a speech in Phoenix that grocery store prices had risen substantially. This was shown not to be the case by a journalist from WSJ, and she quoted the WSJ as supporting her statement: a quote from an article that actually contradicted her statement.

Grocery store prices aren't my concern here. Neither is Sarah Palin. In a minute when I start talking about government, don't think I mean Palin. What is my concern is that this case gives us an example of disagreements on two different levels. The first level, what do we do about the set of facts that we are faced with. That's a healthy, robust, necessary discussion. The second level, what the set of facts are. That is a dangerous, dangerous place to have a disagreement.

It's dangerous because disagreement on level 1 and disagreement on level 2, you'll find, are often used as mutually-supportive. When this happens, when two sides of a disagreement don't even have a common arena (e.g. the factual world) in which to disagree, the whole conversation is a lost cause.

What happens? No conversation. (In fairness, I should juxtapose that link with this one).

What's lost in all of that is that these disputes are being held at the level of governance. Which means, underneath some rather infuriating, obstinate fist-pounding ("My facts are the real ones, yours aren't!"), are real ordinary people, leading ordinary lives, who would rather have a functional government with some elasticity to handle the inevitable crises on our horizon.

But now we're faced with the problem of trying to sort out whose facts are correct (and convince the people who thought they had them that they really didn't. Good luck!). That can't be done perfectly, i.e. completely, but "most of the way done" or even half way would really be significant progress.

So, let me put on my Nostradamus hat for a second and predict that all kinds of candidates are going to be accused of blocking up the political process in 2012. When that happens, please remember, it's actually everyone's fault. Even ours.

I'll Back That Horse

Half as many 18-29 year-old voters came out in 2010 as came out in 2008. That wouldn't have turned the tide last night, I don't think. But I think it does tell us a heck of a lot about the demographic.

Not surprisingly, the young vote goes liberal (58% Democrat yesterday). Now, in 2008, 18% of voters were in that demographic, and this time 9%. In 2008, Obama was polling ahead of McCain, Democrats were projected to take over the Senate and the House, etc. The young vote backed the winning horse, after they had already been told who it would be.

Anecdotally, in 2008, when I voted, I saw several people in my generation at the polls. Yesterday, I was the youngest person in the building by a good 30 years.

This year, the projections were mainly in favor of the GOP, and young voters didn't turn out. Why? Well, it seemed like a lost cause to them. Of course, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in practice.

I stopped paying attention to baseball back in June when it was clear that the Cubs weren't going to put it together this year. The idea is the same: you minimize your feeling of loss if you make yourself apathetic about it ahead of time. And if you're apathetic about it, you'll certainly not bother to invest any effort, like voting.

Nevermind all of that "civic duty" talk, we don't want to hear any of that either. It reeks of Kant to those of us who know anything about Kant, and to those of us who don't, it sounds a heckuva lot like you're trying to tell us what to do. Well, buster, we are self-determining fully-fledged individuals, and goodness knows, we don't take orders from some vague concept like "duty".

I think the best way of getting my generation energized to vote isn't to hold Get Out the Vote rallies, or any of that. It clearly doesn't work. Instead, you should lie to us, and tell us we've got a sure thing here. We're going to win.

Heck yeah, I'll back that horse!

Oh my....

I'm posting a lot this week, but here goes...

In case you missed it, Glenn Beck claimed on his radio show that the theory of evolution is ridiculous and that he's never seen a half-man half-monkey before.

Now, call me old-fashioned, but I do so love when people who clearly have no clue what methodological science is all about pretend that their opinion of scientific theory matters. Let me explain something to you: scientific theories are arrived at and adopted by the scientific community. There are loads of criteria that determine their acceptance of any given theory: falsifiability--the logical possibility that the theory make a prediction that comes out false, fecundity--the property of a theory to create new avenues of research, explanatory value--the property of a theory to account for (at least as much, if not) more phenomena than its predecessor, & ontological cost--the number of things that the theory requires us to say exist in order to use it. That's a short list. (See Phillip Kitcher's "Believing Where We Cannot Prove" for more).

Now, when it comes to what we teach in our schools, the choice ought to be no choice at all. If we're teaching science, we teach what scientists use. We do this because we are preparing children for reality beyond elementary and high school. If your school board decides to teach Intelligent Design rather than Evolution, or alongside Evolution, as equivalently valid, when you get to a university and learn that Intelligent Design doesn't follow logically, requires that the Theory of Evolution be true, and isn't taken seriously by hardly anyone in the scientific community, you'll be in for a rude awakening, from a pragmatic point of view.

What the rest of the world thinks is irrelevant. What percentage of people accept evolution is irrelevant. If you'll pardon the vacuities, science is science, and opinion is opinion.

To teach anything but evolution (at least for the time being, barring the eventual replacement of Evolution by some other theory that better satisfies the criteria on the above list) is reprehensibly irresponsible.

Likewise, it is irresponsible to argue via a straw man against evolution. There is no claim that humans evolved from monkeys, or even apes. The contention is that we share common ancestry. We also share common ancestry with sewer rats.

One other point I'll make, regarding another idiotic thing Beck says in that clip: yes, it absolutely was difficult to convince people that the earth is round. Aristotle's cosmology is a concentric sphere model, which was a prevailing model between Ptolemy and Copernicus, yet still, in 1492 CE, the lay person thought the Earth was flat, scholars couldn't convince them, and people are still lied to about Columbus' grand vision of a round planet. Then again, between Copernicus and Newton, people were killed over claiming that the Earth revolves around the sun.

One more: look up the history of Einstein vs. the early quantum theorists, and that famous quote of Einstein's, "God does not play dice."

Yes, people are extraordinarily resistant to further developments in scientific theory. Luckily, science isn't interested in your opinion, it amounts to diddly-squat.

Jimmy McMillan Remix:

The Great Manipulation

It is truly a sad thing to have to acknowledge, but it's time we stopped laughing at the Tea Party, and started to think seriously about what's going on. It could be that people such as Christine O'Donnell are making a mockery of running for the Senate. Or, it could be a genuine grass roots movement made up of people with genuine beefs with our government. Or, it could be a way of manipulating people.

Today, I'd like to consider the possibility that the Tea Party is just a way of manipulating people. Let me be clear, though, on what I mean by manipulating, because it is obvious that we are all manipulated in all sorts of ways on a nearly constant basis: there are peer pressures, societal pressures, gender norms, advertisers, and so on. Being manipulated in this sense isn't always bad, e.g. educators manipulate the minds of their students, or a well-written novel plays your heartstrings like a harp (and no, anti-feminist Twilight novels simply don't cut the mustard).

But I mean the more insidious sort of manipulation. These people--the followers, the people attending the rallies, and not the pink-faced speechmakers--are being manipulated.

That sure seems obvious. Especially when you ask these people questions about their criticisms, and you find that the criticisms are vague and targetless. However, the charge of manipulation is much easier to make than it is to substantiate.

What is clear, is that our attitudes and beliefs are influenced and manipulated by all sorts of things. What is also clear is the link between what we believe and what we do. What is less clear, is any specific causal relation between a particular influence and a particular action. Unless, of course, you specifically cite Glenn Beck as the reason for your action. Even in that case, there is a problem with the reliability of self-reporting. It's terribly easy to lie to yourself about your motivations.

So, we're left with open questions. If these people are being manipulated, who is manipulating them? And to what purpose?

None of that is really clear. Nevertheless it is a very effective accusation to make, given the state of our discourse, because no one wants to think that they're being manipulated. We all like to think that we're in the driver's seat of our own lives. We all like to think the best of ourselves, and when you have a vague sense that something is wrong in the world, and someone hands to a pre-packaged diagnosis of what's wrong, there is a strong pull to go with that diagnosis. You shouldn't, you should think critically about what you've been told. Clearly, people don't do this.

I am sticking with manipulation. It is otherwise too great an irony for these people to be paying for tickets to hear Palin tell them how the government is taking their money.