autonomous dj collective

consensus science

chricton nails it:

Let's be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period. . . .

I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way. . . .

dyson on religion

in ny rev books re warming:

Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the be-lief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.

hegel

keeping all your options open is stifling, rather than liberating:

A will which resolves on nothing is not an actual will; the characterless man can never resolve on anything. The reason for such indecision may also lie in an over-refined sensibility which knows that, in determining something, it enters the realm of finitude, imposing a limit on itself and relinquishing infinity; yet it does not wish to renounce the totality to which it intends. Such a disposition is dead, even if its aspiration is to be beautiful. “Whoever aspires to great things,” says Goethe, “must be able to limit himself.” Only by making resolutions can the human being enter actuality, however painful the process may be; for inertia would rather not emerge from that inward brooding in which it reserves a universal possibility for itself. But possibility is not yet actuality. The will which is sure of itself does not therefore lose itself in what it determines.

feynman on birds

“Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”

atheism

rather than justifying atheism, this quote actually seems to indicate that atheism's alot like religion, because it requires lots of faith (as an atheist, you have to have faith that, despite all the unknowns, the answers to those unknowns will be similar to (found in similar ways as) the answers to past mysteries):

Yes, the theory of evolution now gives us at least a partial answer to one of the great, pressing puzzles of our existence. But many remain for the atheist. I don't know, or pretend to know, how life first arose on Earth, or why there is Something rather than Nothing, or whether I have any special purpose in life, or how subjective mind arises from objective matter, or why the physical constants of the universe are what they are, or even why there are any physical laws at all. To be an atheist in the face of those gaps in understanding is to refuse the temptation to tame our ignorance by affixing a name to it. We reject one Mystery, and receive many mysteries in exchange.

lunatic fringe

reason to respect the lunatic fringe:

While the fringe causes great hair pulling among many (do they not understand how the economy/people/etc. works?), they are also the force that often ends up compelling change. Never enough to make them happy, but change in their direction. Change that wouldn't have occurred at all if all the proponents were calm and rational. Not surprising, given that the fringe elements are usually the most energetic component of any movement.

Basically, unless you're holding placards and threatenting a storm, you'll be ignored. However, if you can't be ignored, *then* those in change will look at the whole breadth of the platform and (hopefully) choose rational parts of it.

It's been true for the left, right, libertarian, and animal-treatment front, and it's true for the fact we've made *any* movement on the environmentalism front.

No, I quite respect the fringes, even as they frustrate me. Doomed to disappointment, it's their efforts that will eventually allow others to enjoy the fruits of a more rational policy from their end of the spectrum.

pipes re equality

pipes on the tradeoffs between liberty and equality (not sure what to make of the last sentence):

The main threat to freedom today comes not from tyranny but from equality -- equality defined as identity of reward.  Related to it is the quest for security.

Liberty is by its nature inegalitarian, because living creatures differ in strength, intelligence, ambition, courage, perseverance, and all else that makes for success....  As Walter Bagehot observed over a century ago, "there is no method by which men can be both free and equal."

Ironically, the enforcement of equality destroys not only liberty but equality as well, for as the experience of communism has demonstrated, those charged with ensuring social equality claim for themselves priviliges that elevate them high above the common herd.  It also results in pervasive corruption, inasmuch as the elite which monopolizes goods and services, as must be done if they are to be equitably distributed, expects, in return for distributing them, rewards for itself....

In the contest between equality and liberty, the former holds the stronger hand, because the loss of liberty is felt only when it occurs, whereas the pain of inequality rankles every moment of the day.

killing fields

shawcross, the author of the killing fields, recognizing that the left was wrong about whether it was worth fighting communism in SE asia (though that should be obvious from the two koreas) and may be wrong about iraq:

At the end of 1975 I went to the Thai-Cambodian border to talk to refugees. Their horrific stories of people with glasses being killed as “intellectuals” and of “bourgeois” babies being beaten to death against trees were being dismissed as CIA propaganda by the antiAmerican Western Left, but it seemed obvious to me that they were true. I wanted to discover how the Khmer Rouge had grown and come to power; I wrote a book called Sideshow, which was very critical of the way in which the United States had brought war to Cambodia while trying to extricate itself from Vietnam.

But horror had engulfed all of Indo-China as a result of the US defeat in 1975. In Vietnam and Laos there was no vast mass murder but the communists created cruel gulags and, from Vietnam in particular, millions of people fled, mostly by boat and mostly to the US. Given the catastrophe of the communist victories, I have always thought that those like myself who were opposed to the American efforts in Indochina should be very humble.

*****

Those of us who opposed the American war in Indochina should be extremely humble in the face of the appalling aftermath: a form of genocide in Cambodia and horrific tyranny in both Vietnam and Laos. Looking back on my own coverage for The Sunday Times...,I think I concentrated too easily on the corruption and incompetence of the South Vietnamese and their American allies, was too ignorant of the inhuman Hanoi regime, and far too willing to believe that a victory by the Communists would provide a better future. But after the Communist victory came the refugees to Thailand and the floods of boat people desperately seeking to escape the Cambodian killing fields and the Vietnamese gulags. Their eloquent testimony should have put paid to all illusions.

schumpeter

re whether capitalism tends to benefit rich or poor:

The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.

blame

charles on iraq (raising issues of proximate vs. but-for causation):

We have made a lot of mistakes in Iraq. But when Arabs kill Arabs and Shiites kill Shiites and Sunnis kill all in a spasm of violence that is blind and furious and has roots in hatreds born long before America was even a republic, to place the blame on the one player, the one country, the one military that has done more than any other to try to separate the combatants and bring conciliation is simply perverse. It infantilizes Arabs. It demonizes Americans. It willfully overlooks the plainest of facts: Iraq is their country. We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war.