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.

False or Trivial?

Monday night, Sam Harris was on the Daily Show promoting his new book on how science can help us to determine our moral values: The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. I wanted to say a bit about this because I'm disappointed in Harris.

There are two ways of taking what it seems that he's arguing for (I confess, I haven't read the book, but only seen interviews with him about it). The first way of taking his thesis is what I wrote above, that science can determine our values for us. This isn't what he seems to be talking about in the interviews, however. He seems to be speaking, rather of using science as a tool for determining what the best methods for maximizing our moral values are, specifically, human well-being; the old utilitarian standard.

Now, in the first case, there is a rather serious problem known as "the naturalistic fallacy" or sometimes the "Is/Ought" fallacy, first argued for by my boy David Hume in A Treatise on Human Nature when he was a lad of my age, or younger in the 18th century. It is a widely accepted principle. Simply put: you cannot derive normative statements from descriptive ones. Or, to make it stronger: you cannot derive any single normative statement from any set, however large, of descriptive statements. It can't be done. In which case, Harris' thesis would be a non-starter.

The second possible thesis is much more reasonable. So reasonable, in fact, that it has been argued for over and over again for nearly as long as the naturalistic fallacy has been known. Most recently, in The Life You Can Save Peter Singer has argued for it. In which case, Harris' thesis gives us nothing new at all.

Dubious options, indeed.

I can only speculate about what Harris' intentions are for writing this book. So, what follows is nothing more than speculation. What it seems to me is that the only purpose of this book is to run afoul of people who adhere to theologically-grounded moral theories, rather than to challenge the theories themselves (although, I'm sure he does a bit of that, too). My conjecture is that Harris (and Dawkins and Dennett and Hitchens) feel as though the remaining bits of the picture need to be filled in for a comprehensive atheism. But secular ethics has been around for centuries. That's nothing new.

Perhaps the attempt is to further raise the authority of science. But, as I say, it must have it's limits. They are logical limits, and cannot be broken.

Brief Word on Moderation

Yglesias: "I don't think that kind of narrowly partisan thinking gets you very far in the long run."

In response to those who think it may be a good thing for the Democrats for the Tea Party candidates to have won those primary races.

As I say, a center-oriented moderate government, with moderates on either side of the aisle, gives us our only hope of being able to effectively deal with the problems we find before us.

Cheers!

It's About Time!

I don't have much of anything to say about Qur'an burning, other than it seems that Rev. Jones was involved in no more than a cheap publicity stunt to me, riding the publicity tidal wave as far as he possibly could making heinous threats without going through with the heinous deed.

He is no more than a hissing kitten.

I don't have much of anything to say about the Governator's Russia-hunt, other than it was worth a good chuckle, and I don't think it was meant to be worth anything more than a good chuckle anyway. So you might have been offended, saying that it wasn't Palin, but Tina Fey as Palin, who said they could see Russia from their house. I'll tell you how much I think it matters:

Doodly-squat.

Ahem.

I do have something to say. That is: thank goodness for Meghan McCain. Yes, I said it. Her new book Dirty Sexy Politics is more than a memoir about being the daughter of a former presidential candidate, but is, additionally, a call to Republicans to establish the party they could have. That is a good thing.

It has seemed far too much, and for far too long that we have a party of fairly reasonable do-gooders on the one side, and a party of game-playing, point-scoring lunatics on the other. And, if you watched Obama's speech near Cleveland, Ohio this week, the idea of Republicans as a party of point-scoring lunatics would have been reinforced for you. With good reason, too.

I tweeted, At his speech in Cleveland, the President praised Reagan. Does that mean the GOP has to hate Reagan now?

This was because of the way this impression is so reinforced in the discourse (even as right-skewed as the discourse has become). For years I have been wondering what happened to all of the sensible, intelligent Republicans I knew in the late 90s. They were, I think, pushed into hiding when, on this date 9 years ago, the power of emotional, non-rational thinking was demonstrated to all of us, and, well, the rest is history. We were left with the shrill, fear-mongering, maniacal rhetoric.

So it has seemed that we are faced with a choice between reason and unreason, and not a choice between reason and reason. A choice between two fairly reasonable options is a tough choice, but it is a choice I could happily make, knowing, at least, that some responsible decisions are going to be made either way. A choice between two fairly reasonable options forces the options to be better, to work harder, and to try and win us over with argument rather than try to scare us out of our wits.

The smart Republicans have been in hiding, as I say. But, thank goodness for Meghan McCain for reminding us that they are still there.

Now, when are they going to come out to play?