Sunday, November 30, 2008

expertise

Two important stories today about the media and their experts.

One quick note: How much of what these experts are saying is really that important? Restricted to sound-bites, it's not clear that they are providing more information than an average person could muster with a few hours of study.

The media relies more on celebrity than on expertise; expertise is construed, so that celebrity can be granted. Whether or not they are experts, they can't present themselves as such. So the media gives them a name: expert. Now we'll listen.

But compare these experts to those on programs like Bill Moyer's Journal. Nothing challenging, no gotchas; but give anyone 20 minutes and you don't have to be an expert to know whether someone else is. To control the media: rather than what an expert knows, they must control who an expert is.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

What can we do?



I'm profoundly disturbed by the city's decision to demolish and entire neighborhood. Whatever the cause.

Now, in this case they want to build a hospital. Seems reasonable, right? Except that there is a perfectly good hospital right next door. Charity has been abandoned since Katrina. Is it too old, too damaged? Heck no! The Army Core of Engineers had Charity ready to be opened within weeks after Katrina. (But nobody wants to open a Charity Hospital. Heck no! Those poor people might come back.)

Moreover, Charity was built almost 70 years ago. Doesn't that seem old? Yes. But that also means quality. It was built long before construction was divided up amongst hundreds of contractors, each trying to cut corners and save a buck. (Do I sound like an old fart? Sure. But it's true. Just look at the shit put up where St. Thomas used to be. It barely survived Katrina, and it didn't even flood!)

So the question is: What can we do about it? It's late in the game; is it too late?

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

theory and practice

I get hot when GG get's all Kantian on our ass.
Presumably, there are instances where a proposed war might be very pragmatically beneficial in promoting our national self-interest, but is still something that we ought not to do. Why? Because as a matter of principle -- of ideology -- we believe that it is not just to do it, no matter how many benefits we might reap, no matter how much it might advance our "national self-interest" (just as we don't break into our neighbor's home and steal from them even if they have really valuable things to take and we're pretty sure we won't get caught).


For some reason it became hip to be pragmatic. And I'm pretty sure it's not because Americans have decided to start reading Dewey and James (or Hume, for that matter). I'm also pretty sure it's not because we've become a scientific nation. Empiricism tends to lead us down the path of scepticism - right for the natural world into the moral one. And, I'm most certain that it's not because we have rejected the possibility of universal moral laws. There isn't anarchy on the streets; nor has any sort of religious pluralism taken hold.

I suspect our contemporary American pragmatism simply the result of laziness: Why stop at practical skepticism when you can shoot down the whole game? (Global warming, stem cells, cloning, etc.) Moreover, why conform to moral laws when you've got fine moral sentiments thank-you-very-much?

After all, wasn't morality supposed to be easy?

But I don't think I want to stop here. I'm not a distopian. It's not the American people that have gotten lazy; it's our academics and elites. And they've dragged the country down with them.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

"smart" people believe in souls

Why is it that so many intellectuals don't believe that there can be pyschological harm? Do they think that our minds don't work under the same causal principles as the rest of the universe; that brains under-determine the mind? Do our top scientists really believe in anti-empirical and anti-scientific concepts such as immortal souls? Or, better, believe what they will - do we really want to be funding people who think they know about these immortal souls?

What is this talk about souls? Isn't this exactly what the anti-PC movement is doing? Psychological research in the 60s and 70s showed that there are strong correlations between language, self perception, mental health, and bodily health. It's perhaps unfortunate that this arose in the time of post-modern hoopla. But they were at least effective in attempting to integrate this information into other fields. If I can identify an empirical correlation, is that any less useful than a correlation between fists and bruising? (Well, of course it is! But smart people should understand how to think about and draw generalizations from different standards of statistical significance!)

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Times Pic's usual standard of bias

What's wrong with this headline:Investigator says waste dumped as sabotage or the subheader: Rogue SDT employee instigated illegal sewage disposal, he says ?

No mention of the fact that this investigator was hired by SDT. He was not an independent investigator. I have nothing against SDT, but this is shoddy journalism. The headline is misleading and the article itself barely supports the headline; nor is there any need to open the article with gossip and unjustified accusations. The guy may have lied. But Kirkham doesn't provide any good reasons to drag the employee's name through the mud. In fact, he makes it clear that SDT can't even fire the guy yet, based on whistleblower laws. So they got the Times-Pic to harass him for them.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

The things actual science can teach us.

Not that there aren't a lot of huge generalizations in this article. But it starts with the leg work. 10,000 hours to become an expert. Hey, Kant spent almost 10 years on his first Critique. Gotta get working.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

I know I'm somewhat of cynic

but, if Bush Says ‘Smarter’ Regulation Needed, Not More, then I think that means we simply need more. I mean, do we really think someone like Bush can identify what "smarter" is?

Thursday, November 06, 2008

evidence

I had a conversation with the roommate last night. He was surprised that liberals thought the main stream media was conservative, while he always believed it was left leaning. The interesting part was his argument: he appealed to Ted Turner and Warren Buffett. Two liberal-ish guys who own a bunch of media. Why interest would they have in a right-leaning media?

Think about that. What kind of argument is that? It's not a very good one, that's what kind it is. It's all speculative and deeply dependent on a naive, simplistic understanding of motivation and individual psychology. So I asked my roommate, how often he actually watches the news. Never, he said.

I don't think he got my point. Whatever one makes of the mainstream media, however much one's own biases and temperaments might skew interpretation, the first step towards a knowledge claim seems to involve evidence gathering. Especially relevant evidence; but even these evidences of ownership, however tangentially relevant, are just two facts. Actually being a regular news consumer seems to provide more, direct evidence.

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

What's with Scalia being a nanny?

First, we had to protect women from the trauma they might experience after having an abortion. Now, we have to protect the consumer against too much information from drug companies.

Sunday, November 02, 2008

my own mistakes

Life would easier if I didn't make them. Forgot to re-comment a line. Remember to check logs in /var/log. DUH. at least I had a chance to learn some more emacs.

Ubuntu Ibex

Started upgrading by T30 last night; passed out in the process, but i awoke a few times to keep it going. A few strange errors in the upgrade, but nothing seemed too problematic.

I restarted it this morning and compiz wouldn't load. So I disabled it and made certain metacity worked. nipple scrolling was also off, so I checked xorg.conf and it had all been commented out by the upgrader. Apparently Ubuntu has moved to this HAL system. S

o I search around online and find the changes I need to make. (You'd think that if gnome starts relying on this hardware absraction layer, they'd at least come up with a gui for it.) Anyways, changed HAL, restarted.

Nothing. Only the terminal. Something's not loading.

Undid the change, restarted.

Still not load. Uhh oh. This is going to be fun.

Ran off to the university an hour early. Yay daylight savings.