Data Sunrise

5/25/07

Culture

Aside from the annoying references to the experts (in correlation), David Brooks' articles remind me that I have found the most entertaining current writer on culture and politics. I don't want him even to prove a point, just describe life. I open Bobos in Paradise occasionally. It is great in article-length doses. I do wish he would write a more serious book, though.

Edit: And a video that I thought I linked months ago, but apparently didn't. Now that I watch it again, I see a lot of dangerous science with dubious explanations, yet still his philosophizing and historical perspectives are captivating.

5/24/07

Poison of Decisions

So many statements about decisions are recursively enumerable. It's sad.

5/21/07

Pleasure

So I've thought for a while now that food, drink, shelter, and technology at this time of human civilization are really good. Insanely good. Maybe that's because I have always lived in a small house and found it more than adequate even though it is certainly on the cheap side. Or that I grew up eating canned soups and TV dinners, and didn't find restaurant food much better. What I was thinking back then, and realized later, was that it is really hard to be objective about this stuff. I felt that if one were, one would have concluded that this whole material thing has gotten way out of hand. It can't be all relative. You need some kind of absolute scale that says: I can buy THIS food for a BUCK? If not absolute, at least it must be a relative scale tempered by history.

Actually I read this thing once that moved me. Maybe it was two years ago. It was either by Einstein or Henry Ford. He said something like, "if you just stop and think what you are actually buying for your money, you will gladly pay." You can see why I might be confused, and no it was not marketing about Ford's Model T. Friedman in Free to Choose taught me that I could hold principles that I had thought about carefully and express deep compassion about them at the same time. It needn't be cold. I thank him deeply for that and admire him very much.

I have vices, though, like any other person. But for some strong reason, beer and coffee are about the most serious forms I am comfortable having. Yeah, like ever.

I don't mean to boast, and I have also told myself that if I ever feel the need to express that caution, I'm in trouble. But whatever.

5/17/07

Academics

The quality I want most in an academic area is that trying harder aligns with thinking harder.

5/15/07

Crime

Criminologists should study how to reduce crime. Advertising the punishments for common crimes in high crime areas is one idea. Why doesn't the government say, "we have 10,000 signs we would like to put up this Saturday and we are looking for volunteers; we would love for you to help." It would be very efficient, and we would have a community sort of feeling. Maybe that would work or be worth it, maybe not. Let's try it. Why are we so uncreative? Do we actually want reduced crime, or do we have this crazy idea that we need criminals to get arrested and go through The System? There are many more ways to affect crime, even relevant to crime (not education, welfare, etc), that are still much outside the traditional scope of law enforcement and the justice system.

5/4/07

Sanity

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy? -Ursula K. Le
Guin, author (1929- )

5/2/07

Help

Can anyone get the streaming video of Ronald Dworkin on this page to work on a Mac?

God and the State

I have been impressed with Ronald Dworkin's writings lately. Dworkin article
Dworkin interview

And an interview for good measure about the bible with Asimov.

3/28/07

Order

Instead of learning being called a "search for truth" a more productive saying is "search for order." Order can arise by selection (assuming some kind of evolution), but it is indeed fascinating that order can arise without being selected, such as the intricately symmetrical snowflake. Why or how does that have order?

3/10/07

Medical Care

This article has some great insights into Medical Care. For example,

"Employer financing of medical care has caused the term insurance to acquire a rather different meaning in medicine than in most other contexts. We generally rely on insurance to protect us against events that are highly unlikely to occur but that involve large losses if they do occur—major catastrophes, not minor, regularly recurring expenses. We insure our houses against loss from fire, not against the cost of having to cut the lawn. We insure our cars against liability to others or major damage, not against having to pay for gasoline. Yet in medicine, it has become common to rely on insurance to pay for regular medical examinations and often for prescriptions.This is partly a question of the size of the deductible and the co-payment, but it goes beyond that. 'Without medical insurance' and 'without access to medical care' have come to be treated as nearly synonymous."

And that is just as true today as it was when this was written six years ago. Now, however, we have proposals for national health care which put that error into practice.

2/21/07

Poetry

"The silver apples of the moon / The golden apples of the sun." Poets do not write to be understood. What does it mean to write to be understood? The goal is not to hide thoughts behind our words but to use our words to reveal our thoughts. Perhaps it is that in other disciplines writing is used to convey thought while poets write to convey experience, the latter of which is best understood by invoking some sort of experience itself.

1/27/07

Free

"There's a great deal of basis for believing that a free society is fundamentally unstable - we may regret this but we've got to face up to the facts. ... How often and for how long have we had free societies? For short periods of time. There was an essentially free society in 5th-century Greece. Was it able to survive? It disappeared. Every other time when there's been a free society, it has tended to disappear. I think it’s the utmost of naiveté to suppose that a free society is somehow the natural order of things." - Milton Friedman

1/21/07

An interesting article about health care.

1/20/07

Criticism

Many issues we face in our lives fall into the realm of decision making. Controlling of passions, self-criticism, and the insistence on rational improvement (see Benjamin Franklin's virtues, the eightfold path) are not concerns for many Americans, though they should be. A short example: a friend insists that using plastic cups over non-disposable cups is acceptable because "someone's dad could work for the plastic company." Now why can't the argument be made for the other side? The thought is so simple that I think there must exist an underlying tendency to favor one belief over another just to have an opinion about something. We pick up beliefs like we pick up a book. After reading it (or not), we place it on the shelf and hardly consider it again. It is over with and settled, and nothing can change the fact that it is ours and will remain so in the same manner for many years.

A different sort of example. Montaigne created the essay to be a tool for thought. He believed that by writing things down, one can keep one's thoughts more organized in order to arrive at a better conclusion than by pondering alone. Consider the way we teach English classes in high schools. For an essay, students receive a topic, quickly make an outline or scrible some ideas down, and begin the essay with their main point, their thesis. This is completely backwards. What happened to the outline or the scribbled ideas before the "essay"? That is the essay! The English class version offers neither flexibility nor a chance to use the essay as an instrument to form a better opinion than the one the student started with. How odd would it be to turn in an essay in which, half way through, the student convinced himself that his original thesis is way off the mark, and went in a completely different direction? Very odd indeed for the English teacher, but it seems to me to be very useful for the student. I agree anything from a take-home essay and higher should be entirely different--polished and carefully considered. A 45-minute writing race to find out who has the best initial reaction and support for it influences students to think in a dangerous way. It makes us want to form opinions quickly and look for evidence later. An answer is better than an I don't know. (I got these ideas here)

In fact, I notice many Americans who form beliefs and look for evidence/use arguments to affirm them, rather than letting evidence and their reason form their beliefs. We model ourselves after the politician rather than the scientist. Many people seem to be uncomfortable with doubt or not having an opinion. That is a tendency. We don't seem to value criticism. I would like to see people who are knowledgeable about an issue, can discuss both sides, and still have no conclusive opinion. It is OK to be stuck even most of the time because, after all, we are not running for president or writing a high school English essay for most of our lives.

Yellow

I saw Frank Wu's penetrating and moving CSPAN discussion about his book yellow last night. It deals of course with Asians but also with race in general, a topic in which I think I have a growing interest. I would also like to read Race and Economics by Sowell, partly as an introduction to his other books, though. Thomas Sowell is an economist and he actually has a booklist here. Another booklist I like is this one.

1/5/07

Atheism (gasp)

Sadly, I believe the term "atheist" is virtually synonymous with anti-Christian. If there is anyone out there who is an atheist and is not angered by Christianity, praying, pro-life, and intelligent design, please comment.

12/7/06

Action

About a career or life goal, focus on the action. Never say "I want to be a philosopher" or "I want to be a writer." Say "I want to study philosophy" or "I want to write." Why? Because a philosopher doesn't "be" a philosopher; he studies philosophy. A writer doesn't "be" a writer. He writes. There is nothing more to it.

12/6/06

Evo Article

A recent article about Neanderthals.

11/30/06

Yes

Check out this school right in Houston. Makes me wonder how much easier we can make it to get people in positions of power to create institutions like this.

11/15/06

Education

Interesting article about education. I am starting to like that site.

11/12/06

Journey Through Genius

I am reading Journey Through Genius which you can find here along with some great reviews. I had been searching for a history of science book since high school. In this book I found exactly what I had been seeking: a book that explained the actual concepts as well as placing them within historical and biographical context. This book however is not about science but math, though actually it is better this way because it provides a better classical foundation. At least it is better for me to read first before I find other books.

It is broken up into units of proofs, which give you an unadulterated look into the reality of math. It doesn't talk about things; it gives you actual tools.

Greed, Altruism, and Bread

This article over at Reason magazine deals with the philosophy behind a company's private and public responsibilities. The discussion is tight and important. Hats off to Friedman because in my view he saw through John Mackey's position and clarified his own as well.

11/7/06

History

I respect the study of history as a personal endeavor. It is great thing to research a time period carefully in order to eventually make judgments. It is sometimes a long process and a hard one as well. The problem with history classes on the other hand is that a professor who has gone through that difficult struggle of research and analysis is simply telling it to students, and the students do not rightly understand all the many steps the professor has made in his judgments. History is not as followable, and hence inferior for basic skills to math, science, philosophy, and foreign language among others. At higher levels, maybe starting at the upper-level classes of undergraduate education, History seems to be better. The amount of reading must be enormous for a student to follow the professor in an educated way. To my knowledge the higher level courses provide this, but I have not experienced this myself.

11/6/06

Christian Right

Damon Linker in his discussion about his new book mentions the prevailing ideology of the founding fathers. He states that most of the founding fathers saw their form of theism--which he calls "deistic episcopalianism"-- as basically an assumed civic religion. Their belief was that God was bound with nature and agreed with rational inquiry and physical laws yet somehow endowed us innately with inalienable rights, and that's about it. Some such as Thomas Payne were even atheistic. Thomas Jefferson carefully read the New Testament and removed the parts which he doubted, which came to be known as the Jefferson Bible. Is this the country that President Bush alludes to when he says that we were founded as a Christian nation? I have some misgivings about equating the two.

11/5/06

Spectacles

What happens when corrective eye surgery becomes the same price as a pair of eyeglasses? How soon do you think this will happen... 5, 10, 20 years? A 700 year old invention will seem odd comparatively soon. Will it be a funny sight to see an old man still wearing glasses, when they have become a thing of the past? Will there be very few places that sell eyeglasses in the not-so-distant future? This all reminds me of yet another thing that is signaling the accelerating pace of human evolution.

11/4/06

Atheism

An article about atheism that mention Godel's Incompleteness Theorem? It must be good. Check it out here.

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