Beyond Infinity and Quantum Mechanics

In another post having nothing to do with physics there's been a discussion of entangled particles, yet another non-intuitive aspect of quantum mechanics. First a joke:

Heisenberg is in the driver's seat, the officer asks "do you know how fast you were going?" Heisenberg replies, "No, but I know exactly where I am!" The officer looks at him confused and says "you were going 108 miles per hour!" Heisenberg throws his arms up and cries, "Great! Now I'm lost!" 

The officer, now more confused and frustrated orders the men outside of the car, and proceeds to inspect the vehicle. He opens the trunk and yells at the two men, "Hey! Did you guys know you have a dead cat back here?" Schrodinger angrily yells back, "We do now!"

I see from the web that not everyone gets the joke above, but I assume everyone reading this blog will.

When I've contemplated quantum mechanics and its decidedly non-intuitive nature (or lack thereof), I've pondered things where mathematics breaks down that have the same sort of feel and there's actually quite a few of them. I'm going to describe one now.

I'd like to propose a game. It's a wonderful game for you because you can only win. I'm going to write two checks to you. I'm not going to tell you the amounts of the checks except that one check is ten times the amount of the other check. I'm going to crumple up those checks and toss them into a hat and then shake the hat around. I'm going to then randomly pull the checks out of the hat and put one check in my left hand and one check in my right hand.

Here's the game. You get to choose either hand. I hand you the check in that hand. You look at the amount of the check. You can either keep that check or you can choose to exchange it for the other check. End of game. Simple, eh? And you're now richer, what could be better than that?

But there's something surprisingly spooky about this very, very simple game. Since it's completely random which hand the bigger check is in, it doesn't matter which hand you choose. Also, since it's completely random which hand the bigger check is in, there's no point in ever exchanging the first check for the one in the second hand, right? That would be just wasted effort, right? Wrong! (Sort of).

Let's take an example. You pick my left hand. I give you the check. You look at it. Let's say it's for $10. You now know that the other check is either for $100 or $1. The expected value of the other check is therefore ($100 + $1) / 2 or $50.50. $50.50 is much better than $10 so you of course (unless you're horribly risk adverse but let's ignore that possibility for now) choose to exchange the 1st check for the 2nd check. In fact, you would always choose to exchange the 1st check for the 2nd check. But that makes no sense, right? Because it's random, it shouldn't matter what hand you pick and the 2nd hand should be no better than the first!

Sort of like certain things in quantum mechanics. Measurements and observations affect the game. The above game is literally undefined until you look at the first check. The initial expected value of your winnings is undefined because it's a uniform distribution from zero to infinity and that distribution has an undefined expected value. Then, as soon as you look at the 1st check (but not until), the whole thing collapses and bang!, the game becomes defined and it always makes sense to trade for the 2nd check!

The game seems weird because it's not real. I can't actually write arbitrarily large checks. If there are limits, it actually makes sense that there might be a strategy that often involves taking the 2nd check.

The quantum is at the edge of reality and my guess it that it's in the realm where math breaks down, that it's in the realm that I call "beyond infinity." So nothing can be intuitive because we're so steeped in our every day math that when it doesn't work, such as in my game above, we're flummoxed.

Your probably wondering where your check is. It's in the mail of course!

Serious intellectual error

The recent post on illiberalism presented a perspective on a problem for secular liberalism generated by what John Gray labeled missionary atheism.  Even more basic than those problems are some straightforward intellectual problems.  Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry delves further into the matter in The Errors of the Militant Atheist:
 

The thought that most frequently pops into my head when I read diatribes by militant atheists is “Why won’t you read a book?”

Of course, put thus, the thought is implausible. The militant atheists who get interviewed in newspapers presumably have read books. Christopher Hitchens had certainly read a lot of books. But there are good books and there are bad books, and then there are necessary books. And, clearly, they haven’t read any of the books that should, in a cultured society, be presumed necessary for participation in public debate.

…

There is no such thing as “religion.” Some words are fine to use in everyday discourse, but become completely useless if one is trying to be conceptually precise. “Religion” is one of them. Religion is probably the most complex, the most variegated, and arguably the most profound human phenomenon. It stretches into the realms of personal experience, dogma, myth, storytelling, social organization, belief, and practice. Militant atheists often use the term “religion” as a shorthand for “dogma,” but in reality many, if not most, religions do not have dogmas. Militant atheists deride the literalistic interpretation of sacred scriptures, but, putting aside the fact that “literalism” in this sense is itself a modern phenomenon and is sidelined by many great theistic scriptural traditions, many religions do not in fact have scriptures.

…

Religion and science sometimes do, and sometimes don’t, conflict. Krauss is known for his opposition to the idea of “non-overlapping magisteria” — that is to say, the idea that science and religion are simply about two different things, and that therefore there is not, or should not be, competition between the claims of science and religion. 

…

For the record, the position of most of the great developed theistic traditions, at least in the West, is that if you see a conflict between science and religion, you’re dealing either with bad science or with bad religion (as I said, within Catholicism, this is treated as an axiom). For example, in the late 19th century, the theory of polygeny — that different human groups had evolved from different origins — an offshoot of Darwinism, was used to promote so-called “scientific racism.” Christians who objected on the grounds that the Bible describes all the human race as descending from Adam and Eve were dismissed as obscurantists. The problem in the conflict was bad science. By contrast, the post-Renaissance Biblical exegetes, mostly found within Protestantism, who objected to heliocentric theories on scriptural grounds were doing bad religion. 

…

Some people claim that only scientific claims are meaningful, but this is clearly nonsense. Scientific claims are one specific type of empirical claim, but, for starters, there are plenty of other meaningful empirical claims one can make.

…

And then there are metaphysical claims. Metaphysical claims are claims based on a certain type of logic — metaphysical logic. For example, the claim that a universe of finite causes cannot explain its own existence and so must find its source in some infinite ground of existence, an uncaused cause, is a logical claim, which can be debated using a specific set of logical tools, just like mathematical claims. Maybe it’s wrong. But it’s a logical claim, not a scientific claim. 

…

And this is the basic error: Because science can only adjudicate empirical claims — and indeed only one specific type of empirical claim — it cannot, by definition, adjudicate non-empirical questions, such as why empirical claims are possible to begin with. Theistic claims about the creation of the universe are logical claims; these claims may be wrong, but they cannot be adjudicated with science. (And in this specific sense, certainly, the magisteria do not overlap.)

Here’s the problem with all these false dichotomies: At bottom, they come from, and reinforce, illiteracy. And while sophisticates can, and too often do, produce their own exquisite forms of barbarism, widespread illiteracy probably inexorably leads to barbarism. A scientist who doesn’t understand anything about epistemology, or religion, or philosophy, and gets on his soapbox is a joke. A scientist who does all these things and as a result is on best-seller lists and gets published in The New Yorker is a symptom of a serious social disease. Never mind the science-versus-religion “debate,” such as it is — widespread confusion about science’s epistemological framework is producing a lot of shoddy science, and that should have us all concerned. 

…

That Krauss, while singing the praises of an epistemic of doubt, blithely evinces absolutely none about the nature or value of human life — he only needs to know what “religious” people oppose to know what he’s for — merely shows that he’s ignorant and intellectually lazy. That he can write this in the pages of a magazine that is supposed to be a beacon of American intellectualism without rebuke, or even throat-clearing, from his ideological fellow-travelers shows that the illiteracy is widespread and cultural.

… The institutions we live in and through, whether the scientific revolution or liberal democracy or the concept of human rights, were built and explored by great thinkers, who in turn were grounded in great traditions of rational speculation (that is to say, of philosophy), and it is mystifying and, frankly, very scary that we have arrived at this moment of what can only be called cultural amnesia — an amnesia so profound that we have not only forgotten, we’ve forgotten that we’ve forgotten. 

 All too often I encounter militant atheists who are so intent on attacking religion that they are blind to their own epistemic errors. 

Illiberalism

There have been several prior posts about liberal fascism on this blog drawing on the works of Jonah Goldberg, Fred Siegel and others.  This post will draw from an article by Forfare Davis title, Why Secular Liberalism Isn't Liberal:

  

A couple of months ago readers of the Guardian were presented with the peculiar spectacle of an atheist intellectual calling out his fellow atheists for being, of all things, too religious, of engaging in what the author coined “missionary atheism.” The author was the intrepid John Gray and his article was “What Scares the New Atheists.” The religious faith he accused his atheist cohorts of was a crusading belief in the scientific and rational basis of liberal values. Mr. Gray then follows with various examples of atheism’s inconvenient history of collusion with some of the West’s most unfortunate and bloody ideological projects. The irony of the New Atheism, Gray goes on to assert, is that it is driven not by reason, but rather by fear that the march of secularism may be faltering; rather than demonstrating the self-awareness of say, a Freud or Schopenhauer, both of whom understood religion’s important roles in society, New Atheism simply offers another variant of evangelical movement based on a faith that dare not acknowledge itself as such even while crusading against other faiths. 

…As if to illustrate these critiques, recent events appear to be making Gray and Haidt’s case, for the more secular we have become, the less liberal secular liberalism seems to be. 

… the liberal project has been co-opted by a cult of political correctness, we seem to be approaching some threshold where the “party of science” is reverting to the party of the tribe.  

…much of what motivates us in terms of values, politics, and religious persuasion are really the banners we are preternaturally disposed to run to when that switch turns on. But here alongside Haidt, the work of literary theorist René Girard should be considered, for two reasons. First, Girard offers a helpful model to understand the psychology of overly ideological times, and second, the soil from which he developed this theory was primarily the writings of that great psychologist of ideology and extremism, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky once famously wrote that if his fellow Russians ever became atheists they would turn atheism into a religion. Girard’s account elaborates on this theme, suggesting that beyond a certain secular horizon, society does not cease to be religious, but rather returns to a more primitive and tribal form of religion. Like Haidt, Girard observes that ideology becomes a source of tribal identity, but at its most extreme it becomes increasingly dependent not on the principles that it espouses but on the psychological kinetics of its adversarial relationship to its rivals. Positive philosophy gives way to the need to feed on rivalry as a source of meaning. This is why extremist ideologies tend to be built upon fabulist views of a possible future: the more spectacular the vision, the more unreachable the goal, the more immersive the cause. Girard’s term of art for this is “mimetic rivalry.” It is mimetic, or imitative, because it depends upon and even apes the aspirations to power of the enemies it dedicates itself to defeating. Thus the mimetic ideologue’s battle never ends, because in “mimetic rivalry” it is the battle, not possession of the territory, that gives meaning and identity. 

… According to Girard, mimetic rivalry at its most extreme manifestation is a game the Devil, figuratively speaking, plays upon those who work to displace God. In The Brothers Karamazov the reader is introduced to many such figures, some in religious robes such as the Grand Inquisitor, others revolutionaries like Ivan. The game is that in the end, all the aspiration to transform the world by coercion or violence is really but the expression of unbounded vanity that feeds the mind full of visions of paradise while bringing only hell to the world. 

… In the penultimate chapter of The Righteous Mind, Haidt shares with the reader the disorienting moment when he realized conservatism wasn’t so backward and parochial after all.  

…He goes on:

 Based on my own research, I had no choice but to agree with these conservative claims. As I continued to read the writings of conservative intellectuals, from Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century through Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell in the twentieth, I began to see that they had attained a crucial insight into the sociology of morality that I had never encountered before. 

… The primary difference is that while liberals tend to found their understanding of the world primarily upon moral concerns of care, liberty, and fairness, conservatives more equally distribute their understanding of the world upon these themes as well as on loyalty, authority, and sanctity. The importance of these latter principles—as elaborated by those such as Burke, Hayek, and Sowell, and unintentionally vindicated by Haidt’s own work—reveals that only one side of the political spectrum appears to see the world in its full moral spectrum. What Girard and Dostoyevsky reveal is that when these concerns are not taken into account, more still when they are discarded, what takes place after the revolution is not a new age, but a very old, very violent and primitive one. Haidt puts it this way: “You can’t help the bees by destroying the hive.”

As Western elites lurch seemingly further to the secular left, the ability to see and appreciate the import of mediating institutions appears not only to have dangerously diminished but to have paved the way for the hive-destroying Mr. Haidt warns against. If Haidt is correct that conservatives are unique in understanding the stakes, then Girard’s insights suggest that this is the reason conservatives find themselves the rival of choice for so many of today’s ideologically Possessed.

 The Illiberals find it difficult to see any of this.  That John Gray column mentioned earlier provides another perspective  on how a certain flavor of atheism makes it hard to understand the world:

It’s a reassuringly simple equation. In fact there are no reliable connections – whether in logic or history – between atheism, science and liberal values. 

 …Evangelical atheists today view liberal values as part of an emerging global civilisation; but not all atheists, even when they have been committed liberals, have shared this comforting conviction. Atheism comes in many irreducibly different forms, among which the variety being promoted at the present time looks strikingly banal and parochial. 

…For secular thinkers, the continuing vitality of religion calls into question the belief that history underpins their values. To be sure, there is disagreement as to the nature of these values. But pretty well all secular thinkers now take for granted that modern societies must in the end converge on some version of liberalism. Never well founded, this assumption is today clearly unreasonable. 

…Awkwardly for these atheists, Nietzsche understood that modern liberalism was a secular incarnation of these religious traditions. As a classical scholar, he recognised that a mystical Greek faith in reason had shaped the cultural matrix from which modern liberalism emerged. Some ancient Stoics defended the ideal of a cosmopolitan society; but this was based in the belief that humans share in the Logos, an immortal principle of rationality that was later absorbed into the conception of God with which we are familiar. Nietzsche was clear that the chief sources of liberalism were in Jewish and Christian theism: that is why he was so bitterly hostile to these religions. He was an atheist in large part because he rejected liberal values. 

…If you think of morality in scientific terms, as part of the behaviour of the human animal, you find that humans don’t live according to iterations of a single universal code. Instead, they have fashioned many ways of life. A plurality of moralities is as natural for the human animal as the variety of languages.
At this point, the dread spectre of relativism tends to be raised. Doesn’t talk of plural moralities mean there can be no truth in ethics? Well, anyone who wants their values secured by something beyond the capricious human world had better join an old-fashioned religion. If you set aside any view of humankind that is borrowed from monotheism, you have to deal with human beings as you find them, with their perpetually warring values. 

.…Universal values don’t add up to a universal morality. Such values are very often conflicting, and different societies resolve these conflicts in divergent ways.  

…The conviction that tyranny and persecution are aberrations in human affairs is at the heart of the liberal philosophy that prevails today. But this conviction is supported by faith more than evidence. Throughout history there have been large numbers who have been happy to relinquish their freedom as long as those they hate – gay people, Jews, immigrants and other minorities, for example – are deprived of freedom as well. Many have been ready to support tyranny and oppression. Billions of human beings have been hostile to liberal values, and there is no reason for thinking matters will be any different in future. 

…Considering the alternatives that are on offer, liberal societies are well worth defending. But there is no reason for thinking these societies are the beginning of a species-wide secular civilisation of the kind of which evangelical atheists dream.
…
It’s possible to envision different varieties of atheism developing – atheisms more like those of Freud, which didn’t replace God with a flattering image of humanity. But atheisms of this kind are unlikely to be popular. More than anything else, our unbelievers seek relief from the panic that grips them when they realise their values are rejected by much of humankind. What today’s freethinkers want is freedom from doubt, and the prevailing version of atheism is well suited to give it to them.

Ah, Now We See the Fascism Inherent in Collectivism!

It was only a matter of, as it turns out, not very much time.

The New York attorney general has begun an investigation of Exxon Mobil to determine whether the company lied to the public about the risks of climate change or to investors about how such risks might hurt the oil business.

According to people with knowledge of the investigation, Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman issued a subpoena Wednesday evening to Exxon Mobil, demanding extensive financial records, emails and other documents.

The investigation focuses on whether statements the company made to investors about climate risks as recently as this year were consistent with the company’s own long-running scientific research.

The people said the inquiry would include a period of at least a decade during which Exxon Mobil funded outside groups that sought to undermine climate science, even as its in-house scientists were outlining the potential consequences — and uncertainties — to company executives.

In other words, the NY AG aims to penalize, or even criminalize, WrongThought. And, as if it wasn't already clear enough, the NYT's approach to reporting climate change has descended to the realm of agenda journalism.

Within a couple days, Timothy Egan, in the NYT Op Ed page, jumped on the bandwagon:

Well before one hottest-year-ever was followed by yet another record-breaker, before Arctic ice vanished in real time and Pope Francis made a plea to save our troubled home, the world’s largest private oil company discovered that its chief product could cause global havoc.

As an accidental public service, this deed was little known until recently, when a trove of documents unearthed by several news organizations showed What Exxon Knew and When It Knew It. And it was reported Thursday that the New York attorney general is starting an investigation to determine whether the company lied about the risks of climate change.

It’s not surprising, given its army of first-rate scientists and engineers, that Exxon was aware as far back as the 1970s that carbon dioxide from oil and gas burning could have dire effects on the earth. Nor is it surprising that Exxon would later try to cast doubt on what its experts knew to be true, to inject informational pollution into the river of knowledge about climate chang

A couple observations. Progressives love to trumpet how head over heels in love they are with The Science. So a couple correctives are in order. By "hottest year ever", Mr. Egan really meant to say "hottest year in the historical recored" which, at about 150 years — and that is speaking optimistically — is much, much, less than "ever". Arctic ice has not vanished, never mind "in real time". Also "could have" does not mean "know to be true".

But wait, there's more!

The Stone, "a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless", piles on with The Price of Denialism.

With the United Nations’ conference on climate change set to begin in Paris this month, and the presidential election only a year away, we are about to be steeped in political arguments on every conceivable issue, all carried out with the usual confusing mix of fact, opinion, opinion stated as fact and fact portrayed as opinion. How can we prepare ourselves to make sense of it?

A good first step would be to distinguish between skepticism and what has come to be known as denialism. In other words, we need to be able to tell when we believe or disbelieve in something based on high standards of evidence and when we are just engaging in a bit of motivated reasoning and letting our opinions take over. When we withhold belief because the evidence does not live up to the standards of science, we are skeptical. When we refuse to believe something, even in the face of what most others would take to be compelling evidence, we are engaging in denial. In most cases, we do this because at some level it upsets us to think that the theory is true.

In other words: "Disbelieving science isn't skepticism, it's a willful form of ignorance"

Unsurprisingly, attitudes to AGW cleave almost exactly along the divide between collectivists and individualists. Collectivism's raison d'être, having been rather rubbished by communism's ignominious collapse, finds itself reinvigorated by an existential problem for which collective action is the only response. Individualists, on the other hand, reflexively reject anything that requires the end of free markets.

Of course, objective reality cares not a whit about our ideological predispositions. Continuing to add CO2 to the atmosphere will have the effects that continuing to add CO2 will have, whatever they might be.

After all, it could well be that individual humans and free markets, with all the shortcomings they entail, could turn Earth into a scorching post apocalyptic hell hole. Or, if individual humans and collectivism are given free reign, humanity will needlessly enter an epoch of totalitarianism and poverty.

So, am I, taking myself as a representative example of an individualist that has little time for AGW, merely a pawn of my beliefs, or might there be some reasons for a non-expert to consider AGW a far less serious problem than the experts insist it is? I think it is the latter:

• Predictive failure. Whether sea level rise, the frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts, or the Arctic, reality has been decidedly cruel to Climatist predictions that whose due-date has passed.
• Lack of testable predictions. As a consequence of predictive failure, Climatism has pushed its parade of horrors far enough into the future that there is no chance of ascertaining their existence, or lack thereof in anything like the near term.
  
  
• Extreme Weather Events. Or, when weather isn't climate, unless it is. When global temperature records declined to carry their appointed load, Climatists resorted to the sciencey-sounding EWE's. This is, perhaps, the apex of Climatism as religion. Presumably, the lack of EWE's would be required to disprove Climatism; unfortunately, the lack of EWEs would, itself be extreme.
  
  
• Ahistorical Claims. Climatists claim that recent climate changes are unprecedented in their magnitude and rate. Dr. Mann's hockey stick is the inflammatory prototype. However, there is, in fact, ancient climate information that doesn't rely on proxies of whatever stripe. In the first volume of Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, there are a couple pages discussing significant climate change in Europe. How did he know? There were extensive primary sources. Climatists can't have no explanation for what they have wished away.



• Complete absence of deductive consequences. Hypotheses are tentative ordering of observed phenomena. Theories are those hypotheses that have been found to usefully explain observed phenomena. What is true of all theories is that they have deductive consequences: if the theory is useful, then there it has consequences that follow from the theory. If they are not true, then the theory cannot be true. Evolutionary theory has many such consequences. Climatism? None.



• Appeals to Authority. Never mind a philosopher of science, who, along with Bill Nye the Science Guy, might very well know less about climatology than many in his target audience, we now have the tiresome spectacle of The 97% Consensus. Unfortunately, the number is a fraud. Even more problematic, such consensus as there is has no object. That is, precisely what is the consensus about? Try asking the question about something specific. What is the consensus values for Transient Climate Response, or Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity?



• Climatism is post hoc. Climate models are tested against reality through hindcasting: they are given known initial conditions at some point in time, then run to compare their results against climate records. Then the models are adjusted as required to maintain their concordance with the historical record. Being able to mimic, say, 100 years of known climate, they are therefore able to predict the next 100 years. That is a perfect example of post hoc reasoning; it doesn't work for stock markets either.



• Climatism violates its own claims. Climatists insisted that, through their models, they knew enough of the climate to confidently predict the consequences of continued increases in CO2. The hiatus has gone on for so long that even Climatists have had to take notice. Ah Hah! It was the ocean that stole all the heat! Fine, let's take that as read. However, that must mean that Climatists did not know enough about the climate in the first place in order to make their claims.

Climatism has become a religion, a perfect example of Group Think. You must genuflect, or, increasingly be afraid that the Climatists will first demonize, then ostracize, before working on actual punishment. The hell with the First Amendment: Exxon must honor orthodoxy. As our science philosopher says:

Yet a warning should occur when these stars align and we find ourselves feeling self-righteous about a belief that apparently means more to us than the preservation of good standards of evidence. Whether they are willing to admit it or not — perhaps even to themselves — Climatists often know in advance what they would like to be true. But where does that leave the rest of us who think that our own beliefs are simply the result of sound reasoning?

Okay, he didn't exactly. But he could have. The fact that he didn't even consider the possibility strongly suggests he is in love with something he doesn't understand.

And the NY AG is proving that where there is collectivism, fascism is standing right there.

I'm Betting on the Religion of Peace™

The Egyptian Government is denying the glaringly apparent:

CAIRO — Six days after the crash of a Russian charter flight from the Egyptian resort area of Sharm el Sheikh, the government of Egypt is finding itself increasingly isolated in its resistance to the possibility that a terrorist’s bomb brought down the plane.

...

But the government of Egypt, critically dependent on the money tourists bring to Sharm el Sheikh’s resorts, has dismissed any every suggestion of a bombing as “premature,” “surprising” and “unwarranted.”

The widening chasm between Egypt and the world, some say, recalls an earlier crash, in 1999, when EgyptAir Flight 990 plunged into the ocean off the coast of Nantucket Island. Although American investigators said flight records pointed to the decisions of an Egyptian pilot, the Egyptian government blamed a malfunction in the Boeing airplane, and 17 years later the Egyptian-American dispute over the cause is still unresolved.

Since I am Great Guys senior Tin Kicking correspondent, I can't let this go without comment. Over the past week, I have been prowling some pilot forums and have seen some images beyond what end up on TV. Why? Not due to some conspiracy to The Truth, but rather because there are people commenting who are serious structural engineers, and see things I wouldn't know to look for.

Like fuselage skin with holes clearly made from inside by irregularly shaped, and very high velocity, objects.

Pretty much exactly like what you'd expect from a bomb.

Defending Freedom of Speech

Do you you really want to deny some people the right to speak their mind?  How about letting someone else deny you your right to speak your mind?  Best to push back before this gets any worse.

The Real Reason We Need to Stop Trying to Protect Everyone’s Feeling:

There’s that saying: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. When it comes to censorship, one might say that the road to thought and speech control is paved by people trying to protect other people’s feelings.
…
Of course, the real and fair solution is much less politically correct but effective. It’s to stop trying to protect people’s feelings. Your feelings are your problem, not mine—and vice versa.
Real empowerment and respect is to see our fellow citizens—victims and privileged, religious and agnostic, conservative and liberal—as adults. Human beings are not automatons—ruled by drives and triggers they cannot control. On the contrary, we have the ability to decide not to be offended. We have the ability to discern intent. We have the ability to separate someone else’s actions or provocation or ignorance from our own. This is the great evolution of consciousness—it’s what separates us from the animals.

College Campuses should be amongst the friendliest places in support of the free exchange of ideas.  However, they are failing miserably in that role:

Crippling the delivery of unpopular views is a terrible lesson to send to impressionable minds and future leaders, at Wesleyan and elsewhere.

This is simply the latest proof that colleges and universities in this nation are turning from bastions of free speech and academic freedom to institutions that are enabling and enforcing “speech codes” that student activists demand. The result is the death of “robust intellectual debate” on campus.

The campus speech police at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee just declared “politically correct” to be taboo.

There seems to be growing awareness of the problem.  Organizations like FIRE are fighting the good fight in trying to rectify the situation.


George Will had some terrific remarks on the matter delivered last April (excerpts):

transcript  video

What I want to talk to you about tonight is the amount of intellectual ingenuity that is now devoted to rationalizing the disappearance of free speech. For forty years now, every bit of jurisprudential thinking about the First Amendment has been devoted to explaining how we can balance First Amendment freedoms against other competing and superior, we’re told, values, balancing away the First Amendment one bit at a time. 

…Today’s attack is different. It’s an attack on the theory of freedom of speech. It is an attack on the desirability of free speech, and indeed, if listened to carefully and plumbed fully, what we have today is an attack on the very possibility of free speech. The belief is that the First Amendment is a mistake. 

...The longer I live around politics, and I’m now in the second half of my fifth decade in Washington, the more I believe that only ideas have large and lasting consequences. We are living today with the consequences of two bad 19th century ideas that were imported like much of progressivism from Germany. 

…Of course free speech zones are now common around the country. Some of us thought that James Madison of the great class of 1771 of Princeton University, that James Madison established a free speech zone coast to coast.…Because our minds are made up in a social context, we really have no minds of our own. The minds are social constructs. This is a kind of totalizing way of looking at the world and it leads, as night to day, to totalitarian impulses.…The Declaration in the light of which the Constitution being construed is a charter of limited government, limiting the government to protecting natural rights. 

Well that was not good enough for Woodrow Wilson. Progress for him meant progress up from the founders. Science was in the air at the time: Edison, Ford, Marconi, the Wright Brothers. And political science had its own day. He was present at creation, indeed he was the creator, of the academic study of administration, which represented his worship from afar of Bismarck’s Prussian bureaucracy. In 1912 during the campaign, Woodrow Wilson said the history of liberty is the history of limits on government power. Ah yes, he meant the history of liberty, not the future of liberty. 

…Yesterday, as I said, we saw the Democratic’s probable presidential nominee say that one of the four most important things she wants to do in the world is end Citizens United and end the First Amendment as we have known it, to empower the government to protect the American people from money in politics, all of which is spent to disseminate political advocacy. For four and a half decades in Washington I’ve seen many bad laws passed, and none as bad, none as ominous, none as symptomatic as the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. A lot of people say, refer to the campaign finance laws, they say well they’re to prevent corruption or the appearance thereof and they always refer to them as the post-Watergate campaign finance laws. Not true. Yeah, they came after that. The impulse to regulate campaign spending in a serious way was not because of the 1972 Watergate break-in it was because of the 1968 Gene McCarthy campaign. The Democratic Party was appalled that Gene McCarthy was able to mount a serious insurgency against an incumbent president because he got Stewart Mott and about 8 other wealthy people to give what then was serious money, a hundred thousand dollars apiece, to empower his campaign. And the Democratic Party set out on all campaign finance regulations since then traces its pedigree to this impulse. They must stop this from ever happening again, to allow a small group of dedicated supporters from enabling an insurgent campaign to challenge the incumbent orthodoxy of a party. 

…What we see in this comprehensive, metastasizing attack on freedom of speech, an attack on what Jonathan Rauch, in his wonderful 1993 book, Kindly Inquisitors, about this subject, called an attack on the three pillars of an open society. One is an attack on democracy itself, on how we decide who will exercise power. Second an attack on capitalism, which is how we allocate wealth and opportunity through impersonal markets. And third an attack on science itself because science exists to unsettle things. Science is how we decide what is true. And instead today we are constantly plied and belabored with the assertion that science about this, that, and the other thing is settled. Solved. Cholesterol, climate change, you name it. Well, if the electorate is not sovereign, if the electorate’s mind is passive to the touch of advertising, then democracy is a ruse and a sham. If markets never reflect the real desires of people, then there’s no need to respect capitalism. And if science is not to be allowed to unsettle things, if science is to be a series of closed arguments, then the way we discover the truth is closed. 

This is why what you tonight are supporting here goes to the very heart of the American experience, and is part of continuing resistance to the bad ideas that came from abroad in the 19th century when Americans went to Germany because we did not have graduate schools. I leave it to you to decide whether we’ve progressed in that regard. 

…
What is happening on our campuses is contributing to the marginalization of the academy, and that’s an excellent thing. If the academy is going to be taken over by people adopting an adversarial stance to American culture, the American past, and the American founding, then let it be marginalized and made ridiculous. 

…Second, we are learning things. My idea of heaven is endless learning, and we’re learning a lot because of what’s happening on campus. We’re learning who are the cowards and who has spine. And there are more people with spines out there than we might have thought, and the William F. Buckley Program and others are finding them, nurturing them, supporting them, and giving them additional courage. 

Third, the current nonsense on and about campuses, really does, if you stand back and let it, add to the public stock of harmless amusement. For example, we have learned that there are 93 members of the California state legislature who have never had sex. How do I know that? I know that because they passed the affirmative consent law, which says, this is the guidance to these hormonal young men and women on campuses, it says there must be affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement at every stage of a sexual activity. The authors of that do not know what they’re talking about. 

…We’re not such a fragile people. In 1859, Abraham Lincoln gave a talk at the precursor of what became the Wisconsin State Fair. At the close of his remarks, he told the story about the oriental despot who summoned his wise men and gave them an assignment. He said, I want you to go away and don’t come back, until you have found a proposition to be carved in stone, to be forever in view, and forever true. Some while later the wise men came back and proposition they had was this too shall pass away. How can consoling in times of grief, said Lincoln, how chastening in times of pride, and yet, said Lincoln, it may not be true. If the American people, he said, cultivate the moral and intellectual world within them as assiduously and prodigiously as they cultivate the physical world around them, we shall endure. 

It’s true of the idea of the American founding, which is what we’re all here to talk about tonight. We are not a fragile people and we are certainly not going to be defeated by tenured radicals.

Let's hope so!

Enactors of moral order

A book that caught my attention when it was published a few years ago is The Righteous Mind.  It never quite made it to the top of my reading list. Since comments by the author Jonathan Haidt have appeared recently in a number of articles, I was prompted to read it recently. ( This tease  with link is for one of those articles, The Coddling of the American Mind.

There is a  website for the book, full pdf, figures, a summary and other summary by other readers that I think are interesting.  I've included several pages of excerpts here and more limited excerpts below.

This is overall a well written book presenting interesting material.  It is one of the most well organized books I can remember reading.  In each chapter and each section the author lays out what he is going to explain, explains it well and then summarizes the key points.  A subset of the aforementioned excerpts follow(emphasis mine):

I study moral psychology, and I’m going to make the case that morality is the extraordinary human capacity that made civilization possible.

But I chose the title The Righteous Mind to convey the sense that human nature is not just intrinsically moral, it’s also intrinsically moralistic, critical, and judgmental.

Our righteous minds made it possible for human beings—but no other animals—to produce large cooperative groups, tribes, and nations without the glue of kinship. But at the same time, our righteous minds guarantee that our cooperative groups will always be cursed by moralistic strife. Some degree of conflict among groups may even be necessary for the health and development of any society.

Part I is about the first principle: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.

Part II is about the second principle of moral psychology, which is that there’s more to morality than harm and fairness.

But people have so many other powerful moral intuitions, such as those related to liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.

Part III is about the third principle: Morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition.

Once you see our righteous minds as primate minds with a hivish overlay, you get a whole new perspective on morality, politics, and religion.

I’ll show that religion is (probably) an evolutionary adaptation for binding groups together and helping them to create communities with a shared morality. It is not a virus or a parasite, as some scientists (the “New Atheists”) have argued in recent years.

We’re born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.

We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment.

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We all need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is. The French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber recently reviewed the vast research literature on motivated reasoning (in social psychology) and on the biases and errors of reasoning (in cognitive psychology). They concluded that most of the bizarre and depressing research findings make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people. As they put it, “skilled arguers … are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views.”

Hume got it right. When he died in 1776, he and other sentimentalists10 had laid a superb foundation for “moral science,” one that has, in my view, been largely vindicated by modern research.11 You would think, then, that in the decades after his death, the moral sciences progressed rapidly. But you would be wrong. In the decades after Hume’s death the rationalists claimed victory over religion and took the moral sciences off on a two-hundred-year tangent.

The remaining three foundations—Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation—show the biggest and most consistent partisan differences. Liberals are ambivalent about these foundations at best, whereas social conservatives embrace them.

Liberals have a three-foundation morality, whereas conservatives use all six. Liberal moral matrices rest on the Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, and Fairness/cheating foundations, although liberals are often willing to trade away fairness (as proportionality) when it conflicts with compassion or with their desire to fight oppression. Conservative morality rests on all six foundations, although conservatives are more willing than liberals to sacrifice Care and let some people get hurt in order to achieve their many other moral objectives.

Until Democrats understand the Durkheimian vision of society and the difference between a six-foundation morality and a three-foundation morality, they will not understand what makes people vote Republican.

We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.93 If you take that claim metaphorically, then the groupish and hivish things that people do will make a lot more sense.

Durkheim argued, in contrast, that Homo sapiens was really Homo duplex, a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society. From his studies of religion he concluded that people have two distinct sets of “social sentiments,” one for each level.

Religions are social facts. Religion cannot be studied in lone individuals any more than hivishness can be studied in lone bees. Durkheim’s definition of religion makes its binding function clear: A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.3 In this chapter I continue exploring the third principle of moral psychology: Morality binds and blinds. Many scientists misunderstand religion because they ignore this principle and examine only what is most visible. They focus on individuals and their supernatural beliefs, rather than on groups and their binding practices.

In Wilson’s account, human minds and human religions have been coevolving (just like bees and their physical hives) for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. And if this is true, then we cannot expect people to abandon religion so easily. Of course people can and do forsake organized religions, which are extremely recent cultural innovations. But even those who reject all religions cannot shake the basic religious psychology of figure 11.2: doing linked to believing linked to belonging. Asking people to give up all forms of sacralized belonging and live in a world of purely “rational” beliefs might be like asking people to give up the Earth and live in colonies orbiting the moon. It can be done, but it would take a great deal of careful engineering, and even after ten generations, the descendants of those colonists might find themselves with inchoate longings for gravity and greenery.

Societies that forgo the exoskeleton of religion should reflect carefully on what will happen to them over several generations. We don’t really know, because the first atheistic societies have only emerged in Europe in the last few decades. They are the least efficient societies ever known at turning resources (of which they have a lot) into offspring (of which they have few).

Moral communities are fragile things, hard to build and easy to destroy. When we think about very large communities such as nations, the challenge is extraordinary and the threat of moral entropy is intense. There is not a big margin for error; many nations are failures as moral communities, particularly corrupt nations where dictators and elites run the country for their own benefit. If you don’t value moral capital, then you won’t foster values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that increase it.

Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire,43 and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently.

If you destroy all groups and dissolve all internal structure, you destroy your moral capital. Conservatives understand this point.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrestled throughout his career with the problem of the world’s moral diversity and what to make of it. He firmly rejected moral relativism: I am not a relativist; I do not say “I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps”—each of us with his own values, which cannot be overcome or integrated. This I believe to be false.1 He endorsed pluralism instead, and justified it in this way: I came to the conclusion that there is a plurality of ideals, as there is a plurality of cultures and of temperaments.… There is not an infinity of [values]: the number of human values, of values which I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance, my human character, is finite—let us say 74, or perhaps 122, or 27, but finite, whatever it may be. And the difference this makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding.

 Intuitive foundations of morals, multifaceted moral dimensions and competition among groups with identity tied to differing emphasis on these dimensions.  All very interesting.  This doesn't really settle anything, but it does give some perspective on the nature of some pretty deep rooted conflicts in societies.

The Looting is Strong with the NYT

In oblivious pursuit of its quest to prove once again that socialism works so long as someone has some money somewhere for the government to shovel into heaps and set on fire, the NYT sets about that increasing taxes on the rich would provide free dosh.

The NYT must issue its writers with a macro that generates sentences like this:

When it comes to paying taxes, most Americans think the wealthy do not pay their fair share.

One wonders if most Americans, or the author of this article, referred to this chart:



From it, one thing should leap right off the screen: the top 3.8% of income earners pay more income tax than the other 96.2% combined. Apparently, for the socialists with dollar signs in their eyes, this just isn't enough.

So the NYT spends a thousand words or so explaining why there is Free Money for Everyone! It's simple, according to economists like Nobel Prize winning Joseph Stiglitz (whose prize clearly isn't in the category of knowing what you are writing about, but rather, like the NYT, in Advanced Looting.)

It is “absurd” to argue that most wealth at the top is already highly taxed or that there isn’t much more revenue to be had by raising taxes on the 1 percent, says the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel in economic science, who has written extensively about inequality. “The only upside of the concentration of the wealth at the top is that they have more money to pay in taxes,” he said.

Here the NYT treats us to a chart that shows two things, both predictable enough. Our tax system is already quite progressive, and that people who earn more have more after tax income. It also engages in some NYT-strength deception. How so? The graphic shows average tax rate — that is, the tax paid over pre-tax income. But as everyone knows, or at least should, US income tax rates are arranged in brackets (why not a continuous curve is beyond me, but that is a subject for another day).

This isn't nit picking.

To get the most accurate picture possible, throw in all the scraps of income, from the most obvious (like wages, interest and dividends) to the least (like employer contributions to health plans, overseas earnings and growth in retirement accounts). According to that measure — used by the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution — the top 1 percent includes about 1.13 million households earning an average income of $2.1 million.

Raising their total tax burden to, say, 40 percent would generate about $157 billion in revenue the first year. Increasing it to 45 percent brings in a whopping $276 billion. Even taking account of state and local taxes, the average household in this group would still take home at least $1 million a year.

Notice what is going on here. With scarcely a nod, the NYT includes that which isn't currently taxed — employer contributions to health plans. Whether they should be is a topic for another time. However, I can't help but notice a glimmering of economic sanity that typically eludes both the NYT and the Social Security Administration: employers don't "provide" anything to health plans or Social Security; it is all in lieu of income.) Then it piles on that which is already taxed elsewhere, and what is taxed later.

About that last bit. The reason people put money into retirement accounts is to shield it from top marginal rates during earning years, then paying the typically lower tax rate when it is withdrawn during retirement. So what, among other things, this exercise in progressive innumeracy means is that growth in retirement savings will be taxed along the way, meaning less growth over time, then taxed again as it is withdrawn in retirement.

Do you see that mentioned anywhere in the article? I don't. Whether through stupidity or mendacity, well, that is a heck of a choice.

The vig?

Raising their total tax burden to, say, 40 percent would generate about $157 billion in revenue the first year. Increasing it to 45 percent brings in a whopping $276 billion. Even taking account of state and local taxes, the average household in this group would still take home at least $1 million a year.

Left unmentioned: how much does the top bracket have to change in order to bring the total tax burden to 45%? It isn't a simple 12% increase (to go from 33.4% to 45%), because of the lower brackets. In order to bring the total tax burden to 45%, the top bracket would have to go from 40% to roughly 52%.

In other words the tax increase in the top bracket would be 30%, and that is ignoring all the other sources that the looters have their eyes on. Which, also unmentioned, launches no small number of people into the highest bracket.

Raising their total tax burden to, say, 40 percent would generate about $157 billion in revenue the first year. Increasing it to 45 percent brings in a whopping $276 billion. Even taking account of state and local taxes, the average household in this group would still be allowed to keep at least $1 million a year.

After this para follows a laundry list of all the free stuff that would flow from this largesse: free college! free child tax credit! repealing the Cadillac Tax on high cost health plans! (wait, what?) free highway repair!

What doesn't follow is a list of all the government programs that turn people's hard earned income into smoke, or worse. Or the IRS's inability to protect its data, or stop sending out billions in fraudulent tax refunds. Or, for that matter, the rampaging incompetence of federal agencies, for which no one is ever held accountable. Never mind the costs of excessive regulation.

In short, why does it never occur to looters to go some distance towards putting the ravenous beast on a diet, before demanding to feed it more?

More fundamental questions remain untouched. In the quest to demonize the well off, the article fails to address fundamental questions.

Having already paid $700k in Federal taxes, the average amount for the top 1%, how much more before it becomes theft? The argument for a progressive tax system is easy enough to make, but that argument doesn't extend to infinity. That $700k is already well in excess of what those taxpayers get in return; what amount is too great?

More fairness. Picketty, the pole star for extortion minded collectivists, abundantly makes (IMHO) the mistake of confusing characteristic with composition. To him, all the wealthy are CEOs. However, every player in major professional sports, for just one example, are in the top 1%. Yet they don't stay there for very long, and their presence in that top 1% is due to their effort, skill, and risk. The kid from Compton, who plays left tackle for 5 years: how much more does the government get to take from him?

The article asserts that such an increase "[would not do] serious damage to the economy … The big question is how much is too much, because at some point higher tax rates would discourage extra investment and work." That is a very blinkered view; after all, higher taxes do more than just discourage extra effort.

That extra bite, roughly $30,000 per year per average taxpayer in the top 1% (and who thinks the bite would stop there?), goes to the government rather than to the economy in the form of consumption or investment. One wonders what collectivists have against, say, workers on the Cadillac assembly line. The point should be clear: it only makes sense to take more in taxes if the government can spend that money better than individuals can. If it can't — and one would have to have a Pollyannaish view of government to reach that conclusion — then extracting more taxes will make the economy worse, regardless of the impact on individuals knowing that they are working for less than half-pay.

Yes, it is easy to make an argument for progressive taxation. Won and done. When 3.8% of people are paying 54% of taxes (and that is just at the federal level), one suspects that many Americans, if made aware of that fact before Pew asks its questions, might, just might, think progressive is verging on punitive. Beyond that, though, the goal of collectivism, crystal clear here despite misdirection and innumeracy and immune to fairness or cost, is this: gimme.