1. Cause and effect, by Jonah Lehrer.
2. eBook of Paul Ryan vs. David Brooks debate.
3. European Union proposes to fund largest cultural program, ever.
4. Maria Popova, infovore, and here, and some of her favorite history books here.
5. Can central banks still raise rates when they wish?, important questions in this piece.
6. The year’s most striking scientific images, and quantum levitation video, recommended.
You can find the audio of the debate here:
http://www.aei.org/podcast/society-and-culture/free-enterprise/aei-debates-how-much-government-is-good-government/
6. Still hopeful this will be remembered as most important scientific image of 2011.
What is this? Alternative energy process?
is there a video of the Ryan vs. Brooks debate?
Yeah,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-k5J4RxQdE
Although I do have to say, watching this – this is perhaps one of the most intellectually deep David Brooks commentaries I’ve ever seen.
I thought you just finished rejecting the very idea of watching it and here you are commenting on it?!? Are you not well?
I know I mistakenly rejected the debate but upon watching this I admit it’s far more intellectually coherent then a typical David Brooks piece.
3. This will probably work. It’s not about fairness, it’s about defusing discontent among OWS type SWPLs. Of course, it won’t be enough to stifle all discontent but it will buy time among one segment of the elite who dominate in the arts/journalism/universities. My guess is that it won’t increase discontent of the lower classes enough to matter at the margin.
But European politicians aren’t under pressure from a message propagated by OWS types. They’re under pressure due to economic austerity, which can’t easily be mediated by cultural leaders. It’s more likely that they simply think culture is a good thing that markets don’t produce enough of.
Kind of like bread and circuses for the elite.
1. Cause and effect, by Jonah Lehrer.
The title of the article is “Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us”
Uh huh. He disproves his own title with the Pfizer example, and then goes on to write that it is “a tale of mistaken causation.”
Ai yi yi yi yi.
He also writes: “This assumption—that understanding a system’s constituent parts means we also understand the causes within the system—is not limited to the pharmaceutical industry or even to biology. It defines modern science.”
I call bs.
Every good modern scientist knows that correlation does not imply causation, but it is stupid to not at least look at things that are correlated and ask “Why?”
Is Lehrer’s implication that we should give up on finding causation for anything? Because “science is failing us?”
“Science” and the “discovery of causation” is not just a snapshot, it is an ongoing process, an infinite process, and to describe that process is, like the process itself, tedious and not newsworthy.
Every good scientist also knows that nothing is ever definitively proven, as the next experiment just may turn out differently than the previous experiments. That is why there are no scientific “laws”, there are only principles and theories.
But the best part of this is after denigrating science as mere storytelling, his tagline announces his forthcoming book. About creativity. Hahahaha.
PS. Economics is not a “science”.
I am with Lehrer, and if he can get scientists to be less arrogant, and “experts” to be more humble, he will be doing God’s work.
Experts do not know as much as they think that they know. Call it Kling’s First Law.
Then he should have titled it ““Trials and Errors: Why Arrogant Faux-Science Is Failing Us”.
But then it is not arrogance that is the problem he is addressing, it is dishonesty. And dishonest people come in arrogant and humble flavors. YMMV.
More accurate to have titled it “Why Bad Science is Failing Us”.
@Anon- You assume he wrote that to address the perceptions held by “modern scientist”?
Science is failing us in that science, even executed at its best, is producing fewer useful things per dollar of input. What I question is the idea that we can’t know causes because we only have observations. Science advances in correlation with our technologies to observe. So, some of the things we can observe today (e.g. individual molecules interacting via AFM) would have been causes previously.
#2 – Jesus Christ two huge clowns talking to each other why would anyone want to listen to that?
Yeah – why would you, CBBB, when you could just listen to yourself? That would be the sound of one clown talking.
Popova is SUCH an unfortunate name. Not only can it be parsed in English as “Pop-ova”, suggesting bursting eggs, “Popo” is a juvenile German term for buttocks and “va” is Spanish for “goes”.
Of course, Popovitch is worse if you are German (pronounced like “Popo – witsch”, arsewipe).
Since that was one of the names of a character in a long Russian fairy tale my mom read to me, I was endlessly amused.
And people say MY comments are unnecessary.
Jens, thank you.
@ CBBB
That’s the least of what is said about your comments.
I see a connection between #1 (Cause and effect, by Jonah Lehrer) and #5 (Can central banks still raise rates when they wish?). Compare Pfizer with Greenspan: both facing complex systems where cause and effect is hard to assess.
Hence my question: could such recent financial problems as EZ sovereign debt (in)credibility, AAA bundled liar loans, etc, occur under a gold standard? Or am I naive?
Could there be a monetary union at all under a gold standard?
I think not. An advantage, in my opinion.
Re: 3
Cultural program is code for state propaganda.
Oh good thing you’re up on all the secret codes
How can it even be code?
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