Being an Adult

Throughout life I’ve been given several different markers for when I’ve become an adult or man.

Once you’ve worked a full-time job, then you know what it’s like to be an adult.
Once you’ve lived on your own, then you’re an adult.
Once you’re able to give up what you want for your spouse, then you’re a man.
Once you’ve held your child, then you’re a man.

I’m 27 years old. I don’t struggle with the question of whether I’m a grown-up. Some people find a rebellious glee in relaying that they will never grow up. But it’s interesting – what is the difference between a child and an adult person? Answer must be in a sense in which many full-sized people are still children, and young people have become adults at an early age, since that’s what we mean when we talk about “really” being an adult. Answer must be methodical. It must have to do with the way an adult approaches a problem vs. the way a kid approaches a problem. It is a way of life.

How’s this? An adult sees what is as it is -- not the way they’d like it to be, but as things are. They’re not prone to complaining because there’s an acceptance of the way things are. They’ve overcome their fantasies, and clearly distinguish between make-believe and reality. They fantasize, but at the end of the day their dreams remain imaginary to them. They don’t try to bring their fantasies out into real life. They repress the tendency to make everything normative. They’re done playing cops and robbers. They concern themselves not as much with good vs. evil, but real vs. not real, and though real vs. not real might lead into whether it be good or bad, the question of reality is primary and cognitive power is appropriately allocated that way. There is a deeper need to understand the complicated mechanics of life then to describe life using good words or bad words (for example, merely describing mankind’s relationship with nature as rape or development”" is understood as an invalid argument) Metaphysics is more basic than ethics.

With this definition, many people are childish about somethings and adult about other things. I think that that’s right. Everyone behaves childishly when the right subject comes up. Another way to articulate this idea is that adults overcome their biased meta-narratives. They have an overview of how they think the world works and they cram all the evidence so that it fits into the narrative. They skeptically reject evidence that doesn’t fit the meta-narrative, and naively accept the evidence that does.

Another way of looking at it is this – people grow into three stages of how they look at the world. They’re born seeing things from the ego. Empathy is difficult for them. They can’t see things from other people’s eyes, or walk in other people’s shoes. They’re stuck in their own worldview and can’t see anything else. This view is associated with being a child.

Past that there is the second stage of looking at the world – it is an empathetic way. They can switch between worldviews and see how other people could disagree. This view often leads into relativism and post-modernism, which empties factual statements of meaning. One person’s fact might be another’s fiction. They can walk in other people’s shoes and that makes deeper relationships possible. This view is associated with being a teenager.

The third stage is associated with being… an academic. I fear that most grown up people oscillate between the first two points of view, and rarely touch the third one. It is an objective way of looking at things. It’s seeing things from the logos perspective. It is adhering to the logos and accepting it’s implications. It is not just weaving between you and your neighbor’s worldviews, but transcending them. It is seeing the world in terms of systems. It’s not about people, but about reasons. There is confidence in determining who has better arguments, and humility in being able to change when better arguments present themselves. Academia is connected up with this state of mind over matters abstractions or impractical life. While non-academia adulthood is connected up with this state of mind of concrete day-to-day life.

Does that accurately capture adulthood?

3 Hours of Bryan Caplan on The Case against Education

Here is a very thorough Bryan Caplan on his Case against Education.

As always, Bryan is fabulous.

Hardcore Blinking

It’s time for some hardcore blog linking, because my browser it getting really slow from how many tabs I have open!

Here is Tyler Cowen, Brad Delong, Solow, and Russ Roberts talking about Piketty’s book on inequality. The whole thing is fantastic. They all agree that inequality is about the bottom, while Piketty’s book is focused on the top.

I’m amused by Delong’s articulation of what labor can do once machines become as intelligent as us. “It is still the case that the human brain is a supercomputer that fits in a shoebox and runs on 50 watts… (without that) we’re cast back to the other things we have that make us productive participants in the division of labor, which are our brains as genuinely creative organs of genuinely new thoughts… and also our smiles”

Brad has got to be practicing these lines in front of the mirror at home. But it’s great. Our brains as genuinely creative organs of new thoughts makes me think of things like art, music, and philosophy. Smiles obviously get at the fact that human beings like to be serviced by other human beings. Human connection can be simulated, but it is by definition something that can only be served by human beings.

Brad also brings up this little fact when the whole table agrees on how much progress the world is making poverty-wise, “They had to change the definition of deep poverty from $1 a day to $2 a day in the last 6 years. Because the people living on less than $1 a day were no longer large enough to create great excitement.”

Cowen is as focused as ever. “The real distinction is between resources devoted to innovation and resourced devoted to rents. Right now we have way too much devoted to rents. You can think of rents as an excess rate of return do to some barrier to entry, political or economic. We don’t have enough high density construction in San Francisco. Our intellectual property system is too extreme. Rents which accrue to finance. And these rents lead to too much inequality of income in a very bad way. Everyone agrees with that, and once you look at it this way not hung up at all on capital or labor.”

He also brings up this point, “That tax money is going to go to meet promises we’ve already made to the elderly. It is not going to go to fix inequality.”

Speaking of Tyler Cowen, he links to a humorous but disturbing segment on Civil Asses Forfeiture.

Where is the Kingdom of God? Is it heaven? – an article that points out one of the recurring problems I rediscover in popular Christianity all the time. The Kingdom spoken about in the new testament is futuristic, not otherworldly!

Rethinking Hell reaches the big time with a New York Times article and interview. Good for them. Another point for annihilationism!

Why are Danish people happy? This is largely a response to people who want to take every single variance between societies and attribute them to variance in political systems. The article Meshes well with the book that I’ve finally gotten around to reading, The Nurture Assumption. Happiness is highly genetic.

Christianity, Philosophy and Public Education: Reflections upon Retirement For all those who would sit in the chair of Philosophy. It is great to hear from Surrendra Gangadean again, and to see that he is writing another book.

List of countries by spending on Education.
16th - Denmark 7.8% of GDP,
55th – United States 5.5% of GDP,
74th – Canada 4.9% of GDP

By the way, the optimal amount to be spent on education is not infinity. It is not a competition in which a country necessarily wants to be in first.

Speaking of spending, here is Healthcare spending around the world, country by country. The U.S. spends 18% of GDP on healthcare, crushing any other developed country. Of course, 47% of that is private sector. What happens when we just compare government spending per person? United States is still near the very top, being beaten only by Norway as far as serious countries go. Again, not a competition in which one necessarily wants to be in first. But just as far as facts go, this and the previous link contradicts the impressions many subconsciously take away from their news shows.

The beepocolypse is silly, but I especially want to document this article for it’s absurdity.

“This new pesticide, Flupyradifurone, is very similar to an existing class of pesticides called “neonics”. Neonics are systemic pesticides -- they don't just remain on the surface, but are absorbed into plant tissues, and this new pesticide works in the same way. Research shows that neonics severely impair bees' immune systems, making them vulnerable to deadly viruses.”

Read it again. The new pesticide is Flupyradifurone and is similar to a class called “neonics”, but not actually in the class. So in what regard are they similar? They are both absorbed into plant tissue. Okay. Oh and by the way, Neonics impairs bees immune system. But why exactly should Flupyradifurone be like that again? Because the two share the similarity of being absorbed into plant tissue?

Meet Mike and Joe. Mike and Joe are similar, they both love pancakes. Mike is a cereal killer, so you’d better stay away from Joe!

There is so much I could say about the bees and the inanity of the fear mongering… but the deceit of this kind of literary slight of hand is especially repugnant.

Ronnie Delmer on Subtle and Not-So-Subtle Shifts in Traditionalist Dialectics

The best argument for belief in biblical annihilation of the lost (annihilationism) is not long or complicated. It is simply that words mean what they say, and not something else. Words like perish, death, destroy, life, and immortality have to be reinterpreted from their natural meanings in order to make hell into everlasting conscious torment rather than annihilation. Even as I write, the word “annihilation” has to be awkwardly input in place of what would naturally flow linguistically as “death”. But I can’t say death, it biases the discussion. I have to say annihilation, so it doesn’t get confused with what death never means in any other context.

In a podcast for Rethinking Hell, Ronnie Delmer overviews the tendency for people who believe in eternal conscious torment (traditionalists) to use words for what they mean. When they’re defending their view, biblical “death” means “life of torture”, but only when their defending their view. In any other context, even when they’re talking about hell, death means death. This leads to Ronnie Delmer’s insightful list of explicit contradictions between well known evangelical traditionalists and scripture (e.g. Hyman Appelman:“There is no death in Hell” Romans: “The wages of sin is death”).

For quick review, Ronnie Delmer included a list of scriptures and the quotes of some very popular Christians contradicting these scriptures. A few more examples:

John 3:16: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
and
1 John 2:17: The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever.

Vs.

John Piper: You are not mere matter and energy. You are an embodied soul who will live forever in heaven or in hell, created in the image of God.
and
C.S. Lewis: Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever, and this must be either true or false.
and
Mark Driscoll: God is an eternal God; a sin against him is an eternal act that requires an eternal consequence. And we are going to live eternally into the future—the question is where.
and
Billy Graham: [The soul] will never die, but will live forever in either Heaven or Hell

Scott Alexander’s Conservative Rhetoric against Global Warming

I’m impressed with anyone who can pass an ideological turing test. It seems silly to me that people admit that they, “just don’t get the other side”, and yet want to argue against it. If you don’t understand something you shouldn’t be arguing against it. And if you don’t understand “the other side”, when the other side is generally rather shallow political views, then you’re just not trying very hard.

Scott Alexander (recommended by Bryan Caplan) passes an ideological turing test elegantly when he writes a case for doing something against global warming that is rhetorically geared toward conservatives. It’s so good:

In the 1950s, brave American scientists shunned by the climate establishment of the day discovered that the Earth was warming as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, leading to potentially devastating natural disasters that could destroy American agriculture and flood American cities. As a result, the country mobilized against the threat. Strong government action by the Bush administration outlawed the worst of these gases, and brilliant entrepreneurs were able to discover and manufacture new cleaner energy sources. As a result of these brave decisions, our emissions stabilized and are currently declining.

Unfortunately, even as we do our part, the authoritarian governments of Russia and China continue to industrialize and militarize rapidly as part of their bid to challenge American supremacy. As a result, Communist China is now by far the world’s largest greenhouse gas producer, with the Russians close behind. Many analysts believe Putin secretly welcomes global warming as a way to gain access to frozen Siberian resources and weaken the more temperate United States at the same time. These countries blow off huge disgusting globs of toxic gas, which effortlessly cross American borders and disrupt the climate of the United States. Although we have asked them to stop several times, they refuse, perhaps egged on by major oil producers like Iran and Venezuela who have the most to gain by keeping the world dependent on the fossil fuels they produce and sell to prop up their dictatorships.

A giant poster of Mao looks approvingly at all the CO2 being produced…for Communism.

We need to take immediate action. While we cannot rule out the threat of military force, we should start by using our diplomatic muscle to push for firm action at top-level summits like the Kyoto Protocol. Second, we should fight back against the liberals who are trying to hold up this important work, from big government bureaucrats trying to regulate clean energy to celebrities accusing people who believe in global warming of being ‘racist’. Third, we need to continue working with American industries to set an example for the world by decreasing our own emissions in order to protect ourselves and our allies. Finally, we need to punish people and institutions who, instead of cleaning up their own carbon, try to parasitize off the rest of us and expect the federal government to do it for them

It’s not technically an ideological turing test because it isn’t a conservative position. It’s better. It understands  the conservative value language and meta-narrative well enough to use it to argue for something new, rather than merely repeating conservative positions with a conservative tone. Political divides aren’t about positions, outcomes, or even values, it’s about contrasting methods of spin. Abortion can be viewed as oppression against the weak (liberal), or as economic freedom (conservative). It looks like differing values, but it’s really just moral frames rather than defined principles.

Again, I’m impressed with people who can transcend these moral frames and Scott Alexander seems to be one of them.

The Nuances and Imperfections of Neoclassical Economic Rationality

Consider this cartoon. It’s funny but it also represents a leading criticism of neoclassical economics.

The wrong lesson to draw is that neoclassical economics is false. Instead we should learn that it is nuanced, which this comic illustrated, and that it is imperfect, which is what Daniel Kahneman’s book is all about. Both lessons can be learned from psychology, and both lessons have been generally neglected by economists.

I think these kinds of psychological experiments actually do not exhibit any imperfection of the neoclassical model of human behavior. Instead it is a mistake of the economist (or cartoon writer) to apply it in a nuanced way. The question we have to ask the woman who won’t accept $5 is, “what would you be losing by taking the money?” Neoclassical model says, “something worth more than $5” the irrational model says, “something worth less than $5 or nothing”. Feelings of dignity, fairness, or pride are all answers we can insert into the model in order to make sense of the woman’s behavior. There are more values at play than money which the experiment does not apply controls for in order to determine how rational or irrational the subject is being.

By the way, I suspect most people wouldn’t give up much more than $5, indicating that these ethereal values are really skin deep. Even the neoclassical model applied in an un-nuanced way captures 90% of what’s going on.

Human value is more nuanced than dollars and cents, and in contrast to cartoonish depictions of economists, they recognize this. No economist believes that people should always take the highest wage job. They know that it is “rational” to take a lower paying job in exchange for better working conditions for example. Economists don’t treat money like it only matters, but that it always matters. The problem is when we get into the nitty gritty and the values become very subtle, as moral intuitions generally are, they become easy to ignore.

Although the cartoon doesn’t speak to it, the neoclassical model does have genuine flaws. People do make systematically irrational decisions. But people also make systematically rational decisions So the correct solution is not to discard the rational model, but to fit it into a broader framework which captures the ways in which human beings predictably act rationally and irrationally.

Checks and Balances–sounds good but how does it work?

I would like to hear a clear articulation of how the ever popular "checks and balances" are supposed to work - even just as a political theory. It's so commonly referred to, but never do I hear about the actual mechanics of it. When someone says, "we have (or are supposed to have) checks and balances", I always think, "okay, what are they?"

Separation of powers do not equal checks and balances. Each power individually can remain unchecked and unbalanced, and they can aggregate into a wholly unchecked and unbalanced system. One must explain how the system checks and balances itself - how the three branches check and balance each other instead of having three unchecked unbalanced branches doing separate but unchecked and unbalanced things. Even if it’s not functional, a theoretical model would do.

Maybe there is such a theory. I don’t know. What I know is that “checks and balances” are a major tool of popular political rhetoric while being totally content-less substantively.

Literature Review of Safety and Health Effects of Organic

The Inst. of Food Technologists has issued this Scientific Status Summary to update readers on the organic foods industry.

This review discusses the differences between organic foods and conventional foods with respect to food safety and nutritional composition and makes clear that several qualitative differences exist.

Organic foods and conventionally grown foods are not the same. However, the health tradeoffs are not all on the side of organic, and maybe not even generally.

it is premature to conclude that either food system is superior to the other with respect to safety or nutritional composition. Pesticide residues, naturally occurring toxins, nitrates, and polyphenolic compounds exert their health risks or benefits on a dose-related basis, and data do not yet exist to ascertain whether the differences in the levels of such chemicals between organic foods and conventional foods are of biological significance.

The specifics are interesting.

The Devil is in the Pumpkin Spice

Starbucks just launched it’s Pumpkin Spice Latte and I’m very excited about it. As a Starbucks Barista, I dump Pumpkin Spice into just about every drink I consume at work. So it’s a shame when I see a meme like this making the rounds:

This kind of thing doesn’t pass the sniff test for me. but I’m happy to see other people actively disproving these hyped up health scare stories. Compound Interest is one of them:

You might notice that Compound Interest didn’t respond to several accusations that FoodBabe made. Being non-organic, non-vegan, containing pesticide residues, and made from GMOs are not criticisms when it comes to actual science. So these criticisms only appeal to people who are already sold on weirdo health pseudo-science.

The one biggest criticism of the Pumpkin Spice is the one that everybody already knows. It is packed with sugar. Maybe it’s not a toxic level, but you’d probably be doing your body a favor by going easy on the autumn drink. On the other hand, we trade-off health for pleasure all the time, and that’s okay. Just be aware of the tradeoffs.

Total Peace Requires Anarchy. As much Peace as we can get Requires Minarchy

Libertarians have correctly pointed out that we can’t have peace without anarchy. Government is inherently violent, and uses violence to enforce its rules. A non-violent government would not fit our intuitions about what a government is at all. Rather it would be some sort of club. To take away violence is to make government lame and unable to continue. When we dream of world peace, or even domestic peace, we are dreaming of anarchy, necessarily.

Non-libertarians can properly rebut, “but we can’t have anarchy without peace!” If we had peace we wouldn’t need government. Peace must come first, then anarchy, because government violence against the violent is society’s mechanism for keeping violence from becoming out of hand. Once murder and rape rates drop to 0%, and we have assurance that it stays there because the heart of man has changed, then we can talk about anarchy.

Let me first say that I’m an anarchist, and I challenge the assumption that the only reason why society is not one great big riot is because of government. But lets leave that aside for a second.

What is interesting to me is how close to anarchy the non-libertarian rebuttal implies. It is basically what minarchists have been saying for a long time. Maybe violence against the violent is necessary, but how does that justify minimum wage laws? Or taxes spent on education? Or the legal drinking age? These are all situations where government is utilizing violence, not to prevent more violence, but to promote other values. If it were true that if we had peace we wouldn’t need government, then they would support government action only to the extent that it promotes peace, but no further.

Non-minarchists should come to terms with the reality that they do not want world peace. Violence is here to stay. Even if private sector violence ends, the public sector should still continue using guns and fists to promote certain values. Furthermore, if you really listen to what people believe would happen without so many non-peace promoting laws, they should admit that the wish for world peace would send the world spiraling into disarray. After all, if we had peace, who would build the roads?

Short Argument against the Ice Bucket Challenge

Awareness is a scarce resource. We can’t spend our attention on every single thing that matters. So we must allocate our attention to things that matter more, and less attention to things that matter less. ALS is so far down on the list of social ills that it really does not deserve our attention.

Other things far down on the list: school shootings and domestic terrorism.

Does an Altruistic Model of Charity Predict Crowding Out?

From, “Does Welfare Spending Crowd Out Charitable Activity? Evidence from Historical England under the Poor Laws”

The theoretical foundation of crowding out is based on the traditional public good model of
charitable giving. Agents derive utility from a public good, in this case welfare provision or
the well-being of others, and regard their own and other agents' contributions to the public
good as perfect substitutes. This means the agent is purely altruistic, in that he is only
concerned with the total amount of welfare provided, such that the model predicts perfect
(i.e. dollar-for-dollar) crowding out between government provision of welfare and private
charity (see for example Warr 1982 or Bergstrom, Roberts and Varian 1986). However, since
the prediction of perfect crowding out is not empirically supported and the predicted level
of giving is unrealistically low, the model has been extended in several directions. One of
these extensions is the impure altruist model developed by Andreoni (1989 and 1990).2 Here,
agents are said to be impurely altruistic as they derive utility from their own contribution to
charity as well as the total level of welfare. One explanation could be that agents not only
care about the well-being of others but also wish to donate to charities `to do the right thing'
or `to do good'. This leads to a situation where crowding out is less than perfect, i.e. less
than one-for-one. Another explanation for less than perfect crowding out is, for example, a
signaling e ect of wealth from charitable giving, as in Glazer and Konrad (1996). However,
the predicted relation is still negative.

VOX and I on the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS

For a serious thinking take on the trending ice bucket challenge, see this Vox article. What really impresses me is the gentleness with which they deliver their party pooper message.

Sometimes our decisions about donating don't even seem to be driven by values or potential impact — but by celebrities and the entertainment value of the fundraising campaigns they endorse. Look no further than the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge…

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, and its virality, raise some interesting questions about which charities and health causes we choose to give to. It seems to add further evidence to the fact that celebrities and gimmicks often drive our charitable donating more than, perhaps, they should…

ALS kills about 6,000 people in the United States a year. For context’s sake, understand that heart disease kills about 600,000, trips and falls within the home is about 6,000, and shark attacks is about 5. Both awareness and money are a scarce resources, should we really employ them on something so ultimately trivial?

William MacAskill, founder 80,000 Hours, suggests that people simply need to think a little more before giving. In particular, he draws a distinction between honoring a cause that matters to you and trying to do the maximum good with your dollars. "Showing respect or affection toward a loved one who passed away, for example, is an admirable way to donate." But it's not the same as thinking about the impact of your investment.

After being challenged, I looked into ALS. I really wanted it to be something important that properly deserves our limited awareness. It is not. I don’t think I will be accepting the challenge. It is not altruistic to give into a game that makes people feel like they’ve done something good when they haven’t. I think the amount of charity people want to engage in is largely fixed, and engaging in trivial charity crowds out the amount of engagement people want to have with other kinds. We have a cognitive and financial budget we’re willing to direct toward charitable causes. The budget is a little more than the point at which we feel the most good about ourselves (what looks like charity is mostly selfish but partly altruistic). The ALS ice bucket challenge is a waste of that budget.

Tolstoy on Progress

This is taken from chapter III of Tolstoy’s A Confession,

“That faith took with me the common form it assumes with the majority of educated people of our day. It was expressed by the word, “progress.” It then appeared to me that this word meant something. I did not as yet understand that, being tormented (like every live man) by the question how it is best for me to live, in my answer, “live in conformity with progress,” I was replying as a man in a boat would do if when carried along by wind and waves he replied to what for him was the chief and only question. “whither to steer,” by saying, “we are being carried somewhere.”

I’ve been interrupted by this word, “progress” over my life. People would ask me, “don’t you want something better with your life?” And I always wondered, what do you mean by better? Better assumes good, can you tell me what is the good? The effective definition of progress is a product of the cultural ethos, and it changed between places and generations. People should more often stop to think and realize that this unexamined definition of progress carries their lives somewhere, and though it may seem to be a good place, that’s the ethos speaking and it doesn’t always tell the truth. The ethos informs our moral intuitions all the time, and in a world that is absolutely convinced that moral intuitions are authoritative the people will continue to mindlessly follow the ethos.

Tolstoy seems to realize that the fleeting satisfaction from progress and the universality of it. Intrinsic suffering isn’t a psychological disorder called depression, it is the inherent consequence of not seeking what is good. We seek things, they make us feel nice, and then it goes away because it is realized that they were meaningless. So we are not filled. Progress is a convention which doesn’t bare fruit. We all suffer because we are unwilling to seriously seek an answer to what the purpose of life is. Instead of engaging with this uncritically held assumption, we fall back on progress. It is the death of meaning and of us.

The Suicide of Robin Williams

Robin Williams passed away yesterday by act of suicide. He was a man who brought a lot of people a lot of happiness through the art of acting. I’ll always remember him particularly as the voice of the Genie in Aladdin and as Mrs. Doubtfire.

One should wonder what makes a human being want to take his own life. How does one get put in a place where when given the choice between living and not living, he chooses not living? What causes one to see not living as a superior state to living?

It seems to me that for not living to be preferable one must be in a state of suffering. We all have things that we like in life – values – but for death to be preferable the suffering or disvalue of life has to overwhelm the values. But what kind of suffering might be great enough to overwhelm our values and make us want to quit altogether?

One answer is by extrinsic suffering. We see this in the world, where as an alternative to pain one takes his own life. Perhaps you have a disease that eats you from the inside. Or perhaps you’re on Death Row in the middle ages, and the method of execution is especially agonizing. It seems to me that most of us have a point of physical suffering beyond which death is preferable – that eventually we want to be put out of our misery.

This doesn’t account for the high rates of modern day developed world suicides, and it certainly can’t be understood in light of Robin Williams’ wealth. There must be another kind of suffering.

Intrinsic suffering is internal torture. It is suffering in the mind. It is the mind split against itself in contradiction of its being. When our minds are fragmented, experience becomes empty of meaning. What used to bring us joy dissipates into the emptiness. To escape meaninglessness, the act of suicide is undertaken.

 

Regarding suicide as the result of meaninglessness, I’m always reminded of David Foster Wallace’s famous, “this is water” speech. The gist: power of interpretation exists prior to experience, so choose how to look at things.

The only thing that is Capital T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it… You get to decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.

This is postmodernism in a nutshell, and he heralds it as the deep truth of a liberal arts education – it’s all a matter of interpretation. What he misses is that recognizing interpretation is not the end of philosophy, but the beginning. The next question is the doorway into epistemology – How do I know? Is there any absolute that transcends personal interpretation?

David Foster Wallace of course committed suicide back in 2008.

The 12 Commandments

Here’s a new one – the Ten Commandments aren’t in the bible. Well, there are commandments, but they’re never labeled as 10 in the bible. In fact, there is merely a list of commandments which different groups have aggregated into 10 in order to fit the 10 commandment tradition.

1. Self-identification of God (protestants and Catholics do not acknowledge)
2. Don’t worship other gods
   (Jews and Catholics combine #2 and #3)
3. Don’t create graven images
4. Don’t misuse God’s name
5. Observe Sabbath
6. Honor parents
7. Don’t murder
8. Don’t commit adultery
9. Don’t steal
10. Don’t bear false witness
11. Don’t covet another’s wife
    (Jews and Protestants combine #11 and #12)
12. Don’t covet another’s property

C.S. Lewis on God’s Rationality

A quote from C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain:

“meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, ‘God can.’ It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”

Hat tip goes to Doug Wilson.

One major argument against a supra-rational (meaning beyond rationality), as opposed to a perfectly rational God, is that a supra-rational God constitutes an incomprehensible God – an unknowable God. This view isn’t false because of this, but it conflicts with all the major theistic religions all of which claim that we not only can, but have a moral responsibility to know God. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all affirm this.

I am always more impressed by C.S. Lewis as a writer than as a thinker. In the quote he elegantly communicates a difficult philosophical idea that the theologians who precede Lewis struggle to articulate. On the other hand, the idea so original it was named after him, the Lewis Trilemma (liar, lunatic, or lord), is embarrassingly weak.

Mom Jailed for Leaving 9 Year Old Alone

Being a new parent, this is one of the things I worry about the most:

A North Augusta mother is in jail after witnesses say she left her nine-year-old daughter at a nearby park, for hours at a time, more than once.
The mother, Debra Harrell has been booked for unlawful conduct towards a child.

I do not worry about leaving my 9-year old child at a park, I worry about the inanity of public perception having very real consequences for parents – even leading to their children being taken away or being imprisoned.

What is important to remember in this story, is that the relevant question is, “should a parent be imprisoned for leaving their child at a park?” not, “is leaving a child at a park a good idea?”. Some of the comments mentioned in the story don’t get at the relevant question, but rather the second one. This sounds like social desirability bias to me.

"I understand the mom may have been in a difficult situation, not having someone to watch the child, but at the same time, you've got to find somebody,"

"what if a man would have came and just snatched her because you have all kinds of trucks that come up in here so you really don't know."

"you cannot just leave your child alone at a public place, especially. This day and time, you never know who's around. Good, bad, it's just not safe."

Everybody knows that in “this day and time” you can never be too safe. But the normal logic of risk says that you can. Safety is a spectrum, and we trade off safety every day, even with our children. Parks are generally safe places, and they don’t become much safer because a parent is sitting on a bench texting 25 feet away. Kidnappings are extremely rare, and when they do occur, it is almost always a separated parent unhappy with the child custody terms. It is hard to believe that this child was in any real danger. It is realistic to believe that the child would more likely die in the car on the way to the park than be kidnapped by a stranger at the park.

I don’t know if leaving a 9 year old at a park for a few hours alone is a good idea. It depends on the child, and it depends on the park, and it depends on the life situation. There are many relevant variables which news stories and judgmental parents don’t get to see the specifics of. One reason I would never leave my 9 year old at the park is not because actual safety, but because public perception is often far departed from reality. That puts every child and parent in danger, ironically, from the child protection people.

Here is Reason’s article on the same story.

The GM Tumor Study, and Monsanto’s Weird Love of Pesticides

Here is a solid criticism of a story going around that a study linked genetically modified corn to tumors in rats. It reminds me of how we are only willing to dig beneath the top layer of stories we don’t want to accept, and accept stories at face value if we like them.

The only part I have to quarrel with is the vague economics at the end,

“On the other hand, GM technology can be used, as Monsanto has done, simply to allow farmers to use more pesticides, which doesn’t seem to benefit anyone other than the pesticide producers.”

Why would Monsanto use more pesticides that they have to pay pesticide producers for if it doesn’t increase demand for their product? It is one thing to say that some big companies do bad things for profit, it is another to say that big companies just like poisoning people for no reason (and are even willing to pay to do so).

If Monsanto doesn’t pay for the pesticides, then the pesticide producers are. Why is it profitable to have Monsanto use your product for free?

No matter how you slice it, adding more to your product (like pesticides to crops) has to increase demand to be profitable. If it increases demand, might there be a reason why? Perhaps it has something to do with bugs which are filled with natural toxins eating crops, reducing supply, and making food more expensive.

But these people… you just attach Monsanto to some good/evil story and they’ll eat it up every time.

Lysander Spooner on Occupational Licensing

Speaking of licensing, someone once said,

"no one has yet ever dared advocate, in direct terms, so monstrous a principle as that the rich ought to be protected by law from the competition of the poor".

Vox on Occupational Licensing

Vox, one of my favorite leftist sites (Matt Yglesias is writing again, yay), does a quality overview of occupational licensing in flip-card form. Included is one of the best alternative ideas to licensing I’ve ever heard but only economists seem to talk about, certification:

Certification also requires education, training, and examinations. But there's a big difference: certification is voluntary. You can’t work without a license; you can work without being certified.

For example, to be certified as a surgeon, a medical doctor needs to complete a surgical residency, pass oral and written exams, and maintain that certification with renewal training and exams. But a doctor who has not been certified can legally perform surgery.

Gun Rights in a Bumper Sticker

Both guns and killers can both be causes of innocent deaths. We don't have to choose between them.
Since guns are an effective way of killing people, I expect the availability and cheapness of new and better guns to correlate with people killed.

On some margin, guns discourage deaths. In general though, I don' t think the American public are a bunch of Clint Eastwoods. So I don't think that guns prevent more violence than they cause.

Safety is not the only metric we care about. If you get familiar with risk of death statistics, guns should be low on your list of fears. Since it is already low, reducing gun deaths is relatively low benefit.

Private gun owners the vast majority of which will never hurt anyone spend a lot of money on guns (in the billions $). Thus I expect they derive a lot of utility from owning guns. There's a lot to lose (utility to gun owners) and little to gain (lower risk or gun violence).

It's hard enough to aggregate it into bumper sticker version, but it ends up sounding awful anyway (even though it's true).

"Guns kill people, but not enough to warrant taking them away!"
"Don't buy fewer school shootings by at the price of our guns!"
"My gun probably won't hurt anyone!"

Cure for Cancer Suppressed

I’ve never heard any reason to believe it, that’s the first tier of defense against this kind of thing. Stories are too often believes just because they fit in with someone’s worldview. The story isn’t necessary to someone’s worldview, but merely compatible. Just tell a story – “something bad because money.”

The second tier defense is this – if they make so much money selling a treatment for cancer, imagine how much they could sell a cure for? It makes me wonder why these people think any better product is ever sold. Why sell cell phones when landlines are so lucrative? Why weren’t CDs suppressed because cassette tapes are worth lots of money? But I’m sure cars that run on water are also suppressed because of oil companies.

I think that people being in love with their fantasy view of things is a critical aspect of the human condition – a fallen condition.

Peter Kreeft on Mercy implying Justice

Here is a very good conversation between Peter Kreeft, a catholic whom I’ve grown quite fond of, and a Muslim. The whole thing is good, but I wanted to bring up something Kreeft says around the 34:00 minute mark.

Would you not agree that justice and mercy imply each other? Unless there is a role of justice, mercy is meaningless. Unless you deserve to be punished, it is not merciful to take back the punishment.

He’s saying that mercy is not mercy unless it relieves the penalty of justice But then how can a perfectly just God also be merciful? If punishment is taken back, then that is merciful, but it is not just. If the punishment is not taken back then that is justice, but where is God’s mercy? One answer is that the justice is not set aside for mercy’s sake, but substituted from one to another.

Redefining Stereotypes

Definition: A stereotype is “...a fixed, over generalized belief about a particular group or class of people.” (Cardwell, 1996).

"Even if there is a kernel of truth in the stereotype, you're still applying a generalization about a group to an individual, which is always incorrect," says Bargh.

When I google, “psychology stereotypes”, I believe I am witnessing an attempt to reconcile what people want to be true with what they want to be good. Somehow, true bad stereotypes doesn’t fit what anyone wants to believe, so the definition switches.

In order to maintain that stereotypes are false, these psychological articles define stereotypes as a generalization, and generalization as over-generalization or universalization. This is not how anyone ever defines generalization anywhere else. Some things are true in general. But in the context of stereotypes, generalizations become defined in a way to make them necessarily false.

Of course, in practice this is not the definition of the kind of stereotypes people cringe at. What violates the moral feelings is the idea of any generalization, not over-generalization or universalization. The definition changes in order to maintain the broader object of moral disgust.

Some stereotypes are true. I don’t think people want them to be, so they offer a definition that makes stereotypes necessarily false. The consistent thing to do is to bite the bullet and confess the simple logic that information is scarce so we have to employ generalizations on some level, many of these generalizations are about other people, and neglecting to employ these generalizations leads to poorer decisions than we otherwise could be making. Ignoring valid stereotypes leads to poorer decisions. You can call that immoral if you like, but don’t twist the definition to reconcile your contradictory moral intuitions against stereotyping and for believing true things.

 

By the way, stereotypes don’t come from an evil guy making stuff up in a tower. They emerge from our social order, so it would make a lot of sense that stereotypes were correlated with truth.

Don Boudreaux on whether a Few Extra Bucks Matters to Rich People

Boudreaux at Café Hayek makes a good point.

When I first tuned in to the “discussion,” the learned sports panelists were debating the appropriate penalty that the National Basketball Association should impose on L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling for his racist remarks.  All agreed that the penalty should be astronomically high because (in the words of one of the sports-talkers) “two million dollars means nothing to a billionaire like Sterling.”

The very next topic the sports-talkers turned to was the National Football League’s annual draft of college football players.  The sports-talkers unanimously and vigorously agreed with each other that the only reason the N.F.L. owners make such a spectacle of their association’s annual draft is to “squeeze every penny of profit from the fans” (to quote a sports-talker, who meant to be highly critical of N.F.L. owners).

Question: does or does not a few extra bucks matter to rich people?

Scott Sumner on the Internal Consistency of Pessimists

Here is Scott Sumner at the Money Illusion.

Some pessimists worry that we are merely creating “McJobs” for the least skilled. Others worry that most of the new jobs require lots of skills, leaving the unskilled without good prospects.  Most pessimists worry about both problems, even if it isn’t internally consistent.  Just as pessimists worry that machines will take the place of workers in Japan, and that there won’t be enough young people to take care of the elderly.

Bryan Caplan writes a Letter to Nationalism

My last post reminded me of a Bryan Caplan post; a letter to nationalism.

Nationalism, I know you're itching to lecture me about how you're better than all the other Nationalisms out there.  That may be true, but it's no excuse for the way you treat me.  Stop talking like you own the house I live in, the air I breathe, or me.  You don't.  You never did.  Frankly, Nationalism, you make my flesh crawl.

Bill Hicks on Proud to be an American

Morgan Freeman on Income Inequality and Racism in America

Here is Morgan Freeman on income inequality and racism in America.

Is Morgan Freeman a liberal? Judging from his answer alone (and the fact that youngconservatives.com posted the video), it seems like the answer is no. But there are two very strong predictors of liberalism which he owns, one is being black and the other is being a Hollywood actor. This builds a very strong presumption of liberalism which any other more specific factors have to tug against. Most likely scenario: he’s a liberal who deviates from the popular liberal tone on this subject.

Freeman stops short of saying what conservatives seem to believe, and I think is correct, which is that racism these days is overblown. Instead he says that the media exacerbates the problem by talking about it so much, which is different from saying that there is no problem.

Is Freeman right about income inequality? He says that we need a middle class to buy things which the rich produce. Without a middle class you don’t have consumers. This is a common answer for non-economists to give, less common for economists, although I’ve heard it. There is something like what he said that has a stronger economic foundation (aggregate demand shortages). But the dollar bills that are not in the middle-classes hands – demanding goods and services - have not disappeared off the face of the planet. For many decades we had income inequality and we still had demand and production and employment. And we’ve had business cycles for two centuries during both income inequality and income equality periods.

I think this explanation is so appealing to people because inequality is a villain. And whenever there is a story where the villain is the cause of something bad, we buy into that story. Kind of like the people who think global warming or GMOs are killing the bees. There isn’t a single bit of evidence for it, but global warming and GMOs are also villains. All we need to believe that our villains are behind some problem is for it not to be absolutely impossible.

Bryan Caplan’s Fertility Thought Experiment

Bryan Caplan says:

Imagine a Eugenic America where citizens who earn less than median income are forbidden to have children.  Enforcement isn't perfect, so 5% of all kids born are "illegals."  Over time, this leads to a substantial stock of people who weren't supposed to be born in the first place.

Regardless of your political standpoint, you probably think the libertarian advocate of Open Breeding has right on his side.  Suppose then you were transported to Eugenic America.  How would you rebut your side's stereotypical objections to free reproduction?  How convincing would you be?  If your honest answer is, "Not very," what does that tell you about your compatriots?

Bryan never says so explicitly, but his thought experiment is an analogy for boarders.

Steve Sailer responds:

According to Gregory Clark's research on wills in England from 1200 to 1800, that's pretty much how English society worked: the richer you were, the earlier you could get married and the more children you would tend to have.

And we all know how badly that turned out!

Bryan:

Indeed, his two-sentence comment strongly suggests two frightening positions:

1. There is no important moral distinction between (a) a social system where everyone is perfectly free to have children, but rich people end up having more kids than poor people, and (b) a social system where draconian eugenic policies actually forbid poor people to have kids.*

2. The social consequences of England's historic differential fertility were so outstanding that we shouldn't morally criticize draconian eugenic policies likely to have similar effects…

Generalizing this approach would imply, for example, that there is no important moral difference between a 99% Catholic country with freedom of religion, and a 99% Catholic country where an Inquisition cruelly persecutes dissenters to maintain Catholicism's dominance.

Are Elijah and Enoch in Heaven?

Did Enoch and Elijah die? Or are they in heaven?

And Enoch walked with God; and he was not; for God took him”.

Let us turn our attention to the phrase in Gen. 5:24, “ he was not“. That phrase is often used of death in the Old Testament. We read, for example in Jer. 31:15, “….A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rahel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not“. And the phrase is used in the same way in Job 7:21, “…..for now shall I sleep in the dust; but Thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be“.

 

Does that mean that Elijah never died, but went directly into heaven? I think we must consider Jn. 3:13 again, “No man hath ascended to heaven but He Who came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven”. Let us consider this passage in II Kings more carefully.

To begin with, the Hebrew word translated “heaven” is “shahmahyim“. The “im” tells us that it is plural, i.e. there is more than one heaven. It is used of the dwelling place of God in Gen. 1:1 where we read, “In the beginning God created the heaven(s) and the earth”. It is also used in Gen.1: 26 where we read, “and God said, ‘Let us make man in Our image…..and let them have dominion over…… the fowls of the air (shahmahyim).…..”. And in Gen. 7:11 we read, “In the sixth hundredth year of Noah’s life, ……were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven(s) were opened”. So the same Hebrew word is used of the heaven where the birds fly, where the clouds gather and where God is on His throne. The question we must answer then is; to which heaven was Elijah taken?

Super-Economy on Nordic inequality

From super-economy, hat tip: Tyler Cowen

Sweden is known for income equality. Increasingly, studies also point to Sweden as a country characterized by high intergenerational mobility of income. Income-distribution and wealth distribution are however not the same thing. What some may not know is that wealth-inequality is relatively high in Sweden. The top one percent own around 35% of wealth in the United States. In Sweden, because of extensive tax evasion, the number is harder to calculate. When including estimates of wealth held outside of Sweden, Roine and Waldenström estimate that the top one percent richest Swedes own 25-40% of total wealth, not far from American inequality levels, and increasing more rapidly.

At the same time, the intergenerational mobility of top wealth is chokingly low. A recent studyfound that a astonishing 80-90% of inequality of top wealth is transmitted to the next generation in Sweden!

According to one study the share of the richest Swedes who inherited their wealth is around, 2/3 with 1/3 being entrepreneurs, while in the United States it was the opposite, with 1/3 of the wealthiest inherited their wealth while around 2/3 are entrepreneurs.

It is popular to cite startling facts about wealth inequality, but few actually know what they mean. “What does it mean?” should be question #1 for anyone who takes this stuff seriously (few people). It becomes worse than ignorance when they switch between wealth and income depending on if they want to scare people with absolute figures (use wealth), or compare them to Nordic countries (use income). This stupidly popular video commits this sin worse than ignorance. What people think they’re citing is the standard of living of the rich vs. poor, which in fact is captured by the stat that’s virtually never cited – consumption inequality.

RationalWiki on Political Demographics of the Academic World

Here is some more political demographic data from the academic world. It was derived from rationalwiki, a site which treats conservative dogmas with crude hostility, and generally treats liberal dogma with emotionless factuality (see creationism or anti-vaccination vs. GMOs or the Jesus Myth). Still, they’re fairly rational, even if they treat what they see as irrationality in different ways depending on who’s saying it.

University of Toronto survey

This survey asked 1,634 full-time employed faculty members at four year institutions across the U.S. However, the sample was largely limited to full-time social-science and humanities professors, which skewed it:^[2]

All professors - Ivy League professors

Liberal 72% - 87%

Moderate 13% - 0%

Conservative 15% -13%

Liberal professors by discipline

Humanities - 81%

Social Science - 75%

Engineering - 51%

Business - 49%

According to Christopher Shea of the Boston Globe, a 2001 survey carried out by the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute "identified a distinct leftward tilt in academia, but a smaller one than you might expect."^[4] It further indicated that extremists on either side of the spectrum make up less than 6% of all professors, although the vast majority of these were left-wingers.

All professors

Far-left - 5.3%

Liberal - 42.3%

Moderate - 34.4%

Conservative - 17.7%

Far-right - 0.3%

[edit]Carnegie University survey

This 1989 survey is somewhat dated. Libertarian Peter G. Klein used this article for his rant on socialist economists, which placed liberals and communists in the same camp.^[5] It indicated that over 70% of tenure-tracked professors were liberal, while less than 20% were conservative.

Liberal professors by discipline

Public Affairs
88%

Ethnic Studies
76%

Anthropologists
72%

Political Scientists
72%

Economists
63%

More political demographic information here.

Reason Magazine on GMO Safety

This is a decent article -- Why Do These Well-Fed Anti-Science Activists Oppose Safe, Cheap Food For Poor People? Although the title is the kind of cheap shot I more often see in liberal journalism.

Jon Entine of the Genetic Literacy Project responds: "We've eaten about 7 trillion meals in the 18 years since GMOs first came on the market. There's not one documented instance of someone getting so much as a sniffle."

Given all the fear from media and activists, you might be surprised to learn that most serious scientists agree with him. "There have been about 2,000 studies," says Entine, and "there is no evidence of human harm in a major peer-reviewed journal."

Nature is terrible at feeding people, and genetically modified foods have been a safe and effective way of escaping nature’s cruelty.

Racism Paranoids

Shit Rich College Kids say, (not my title)

White men make up approximately 36% of the population, but commit 75% of mass shootings. What would be called terrorism by any other skin tone is suddenly some mysterious unnamed disease. We as a society are perfectly happy to further stigmatize mentally ill people, who are far more likely to be victims of violence than commit violence, in the service of protecting white supremacy and male entitlement.

here’s another blog stating,

Black Crime =Gang Violence. Arab Crime = Terrorism. Hispanic Crime = Illegal immigration. White Crime = No crime, he was just insane.

here we go again. white kid carries out plan to murder people and already the mainstream media is going through with the “he was disturbed,” “he was mentally ill” and “he was insane” spin on the story. gotta protect that image of white purity and innocence no matter what.

1. I've never met anybody who thinks that people who kill in mass must have some unnamed disease.

2. I've never met anybody who blankets terrorism over mass killings, no matter what the race. What is unique to terrorism is the pursuit of political aims.

3. I've never met anybody who is perfectly happy stigmatizing people with mental disabilities.

4. I think most people define gang  violence as violence done by a gang, not violence done by black people.

5. I think most people define Terrorism as violence in pursuit of political aims, not Arab crime.

6. I think most people define Illegal immigration as moving to a country in spite of laws stating they can’t.

7. I think most people define insanity by severely abnormal mental and behavioral problems.

8. I think it is at least possible that the kind of violence predicts the race of the person committing it. E.g. gang violence is committed disproportionately by black people. That is not the same as the race being a strong predictor of whether they’re criminals. E.g. Black people are not all committing gang violence.

9. I’ve never met anyone who systematically excuses white crime for insanity.

10. I think that a racist culture or racist society doesn’t need to pretend like it’s not racist. The fact that racism paranoids have to crack the secret language of the our white supremacy society indicates that it is not really a white supremacy society. Racists in a racist society don’t need to hide.

Politics of 6 Professional Academic Associations

The Brookings institute got 550 responses from professional associations concerning their political affiliations. The Republican to Democrat Ratios were as follows:

Economics 3.7 - 1

History 4.1 – 1

Political Science 4.8 - 1

Sociology 47 – 1

Labor Economist 4 - 1

Public Economist 3.2 – 1

The Sociology ratio is not a mistake. It is not 4.7 to 1 but 47 to 1. In comparison Economics is labeled the “right wing social science” where Democrats outnumber Republicans 3.7 to 1. This is interesting especially since Economists and Sociologists basically study the same thing – society. I see the political diversity of economists as a reason why it performs better than sociology at answering tough questions. Not because they’re more right wing, but because both left and right hold biases that hinders their ability to criticize research that confirms what they always knew deep down inside.

Jonathan Haidt on Ideology affecting Science

The Single Greatest Cause of Atheism?

The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.
-Brennan Manning

Sounds good. Is it true? My experience is that most atheists don’t make the intellectual mistake of gauging the truth of claims by the behavior of the claimers. The Christian lifestyle is no evidence one way or another of whether God exists. It just isn’t. I suspect; however, that religion is often accepted for expressive and social reasons. People become Christians because they like they like associations that come with it. “I’m a Christian” is not about what you believe, it’s about who you think you are or who you want others to see you as. They believe what they have to in order to in order to achieve a social or self-expressive end without feeling cognitive dissonance from inconsistency.

This is how I see all political groups and religions by the way, it is not unique to Christianity.

What is the single greatest cause of atheism? My experience is that theists have failed to “give a reason for the hope that is in them” It’s in the bible might be “a reason” literally, it’s not an intellectually satisfying reason (a sounds argument). Faith is not an intellectually satisfying reason if one is a fideist (Faith over and against Reason). We should have a good and proper reason for believing what we believe, and we should have a good and proper reasons for the new beliefs we take on. Surrendra Gangadean does this in A Philosophical Foundation.

Bryan Caplan’s Response to Climate Change Comic Writer

Here is Bryan Caplan’s rejoinder to Yoram Bauman, who wrote A Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change. The whole thing comes from Bryan’s critique of the comic.

Bryan, as always, is civil, logical, and to the point.

Yoram Bauman:

“"Insurance is NOT a no-brainer." You're absolutely right that buying an extended warranty for a toaster is a bad idea, but the cartoon book repeatedly emphasizes low probability outcomes that are catastrophic, which is a pretty good focal point for insurance.”

Bryan:

No, it's a terrible focal point for insurance.  Most people fail to insure against many low-probability catastrophic events - and you probably don't want to call them fools.  Just one example: Costco.com sells a year's supply of dehydrated food for $1499.99.  This product provides excellent insurance against a long list of natural and man-made disasters.  Question: Have you bought it?  If not, why not?  The same goes for what you drive (probably not the safest car), where you live (probably not the safest neighborhood in your area, much less the country or world), where you travel, who you sleep with, and so on.  Low-probability catastrophes lurk around every corner, but the standard response seems to be, "Until I see concrete dangers, I'll take my chances."

Bryan has made comments on several educational comics, including:

Microeconomics

Macroeconomics

Climate Change

and Jonathan Gruber’s comic on Health Care