If one truly believes “social issues can’t be solved logically because they involve people, who are emotional and irrational” or that “what people think ultimately comes down to their personal moral compass, not a dispassionate evaluation of the facts”, why even bother to engage people who think differently than we do? Today’s partisans might respond: the better to gain ammunition against the enemy.
As it turns out, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently forecast that US energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions would decline by 11% in 2020. Since CO2 emissions account for around 97% of energy-related emissions, we will likely lower CO2 emissions by 10.7% this year alone. How can we lower emissions even more? …
An Excerpt: “Defying conventional wisdom about a polarized electorate, a report based on in-depth surveys of more than 80,000 Americans shows that majorities from both parties agree on nearly 150 key policy positions across more than a dozen top policy areas. The research suggests that Americans are eager for their elected representatives to cross party lines to start tackling the nation’s toughest problems…In the surveys, respondents were given in-depth information about the policy issues and legislative proposals under consideration in Congress, and evaluated arguments for and against each policy option before coming to their conclusions. The content was reviewed by experts at both ends of the spectrum of opinion on the issues.”
Now that’s the way to conduct a survey!
I’ll start this exploration with my long-standing definition of ideology as “an army of convictions about how the world is and how it ought to be.” This definition is remarkably similar to one provided by Cory Clark and Bo Winegard in their paper, Tribalism in War and Peace: The Nature and Evolution of Ideological Epistemology and Its Significance for Modern Social Science:
By ideology, we mean, roughly, a mental model of the world and the social order that is both descriptive (how the world is) and normative (how it should be); and by sacred value, we mean, roughly, a value that is held particularly fervidly and that one is incredibly reluctant to relinquish.
So what are ideological tendencies? Ways of thinking and reasoning that distort reality and which are motivated by ideological beliefs. Some examples: …
The first step in fixing a problem is understanding it. That includes having a solid grasp of how big the problem is, relevant context, and whether the problem is getting better or worse. So I’ve been doing some research on the problem of police brutality against blacks. Here is a bit of what I’ve found:
We often talk of the middle-class or the one percent as if they were the same group of people from year to year. But most Americans move up and down the income ladder across the lifespan: mostly up during the peak earning years of 25-54 and then slowly down as they ease into retirement. Many experience a few years of poverty when young but then eventually reach the middle-class and beyond as they get older. This chart tell the story:
This chart is based on research by Thomas A Hirshcl and Mark R. Rank, who crunched decades of tax data to gauge the fortunes of thousands of US households over time.
“David Abrams of the University of Pennsylvania pulls together data from some two dozen major cities on citycrimestats.com. His figures show that so far this year crime is actually down by around 10% compared with the same period in 2015-19.” - Fears that America is experiencing a serious crime wave are overblown. The Economist August 1, 2020
One response to “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” was “A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate”, signed by 163 individuals in The Objective on July 10, 2020. This second letter (aka “the Response”) is described by the signatories as “a group effort, started by journalists of color with contributions from the larger journalism, academic, and publishing community.” The Response includes the following 12 points …
Fascism is a popular slur largely because it’s versatile: a word with no agreed-upon meaning, so accusers can use whatever definition works to hit their intended target. Often, these definitions read like symptom checklists. For example:
What caught my eye when first reading the San Francisco Chronicle piece was its reference to Pew Research polling data that “just 22% of African-Americans want police funding ‘decreased a lot’.” Say what!…Here’s a nice chart of the Pew respondent breakdown on police funding:
Hundreds of organizations have endorsed the Great American Outdoors Act, including the Audubon Naturalist Society, Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, Defenders of Wildlife, League of Conservation Voters, National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds, National Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club, and The Nature Conservancy. According to Mark Kramer, a director of the California chapter the Nature Conservancy, one of the highlights of the Great American Outdoors Act is that secures reliable funding to help protect the nation’s ecological diversity, including its wildlife.
…And bring them back to school they did - at least in Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Israel , Japan., and The Netherlands (among others). Within and across these countries, schools have varied in their approach to limiting viral spread. Some mix in-person and online classes or allow only part-time classes. Most have small classes and limit children’s interactions outside the classroom. Children are often required to wear masks and practice social distancing. However, Austrian schools are “fully open and don’t even require young children wear masks.” Japan requires parents to take and report their children’s temperature every morning.
What if….
…the progressive left completes its take-over of the Democratic Party. In the next election Democrats win the presidency and achieve majorities in both chambers of Congress. The new Congress passes a bunch of legislation to address “structural inequality and systemic racism”, including a law requiring large corporations to root out sexism and racism in the workplace. Specifically, the “Social Justice at Work Act” mandates that all corporations with at least 100 employees establish Social Justice Committees to deal with racist and sexist employees.
The following basic facts and figures are from reports recently released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the US Bureau of Justice Statistics. Please check out the original reports (here and here) as well - they’re a treasure trove of interesting info, plus easy to read with lots of charts for the visually-inclined.
Just a few years ago talk of robots taking over was all the rage. Thanks to robots, humans would no longer have to work unless they wanted to. Some typical headlines:
When Robots Take All the Work, What'll Be Left for Us to Do? (Wired/2015)
Robots will take over most jobs within 30 years, experts warn (The Telegraph/2016)
Robots will eliminate 6% of all US jobs by 2021, report says (The Guardian, 2016)
After two years of growth, global emissions were unchanged at 33 gigatonnes in 2019 even as the world economy expanded by 2.9%. This was primarily due to declining emissions from electricity generation in advanced economies, thanks to the expanding role of renewable sources (mainly wind and solar), fuel switching from coal to natural gas, and higher nuclear power generation.
In the real world, we talk more of causes than rules, but the process of establishing a causal relation is similar to that of validating a rule: seek cases that disconfirm the proposition that x causes y. In other words, find cases of x without y and y without x (the equivalent of turning over the D and 7 cards in the Wason task).
“Crime is opportunistic. If there’s no opportunity, there’s no crime” Criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, quoted by Alec MacGillis in The Dollar-Store Deaths/The New Yorker, July 6 & 13, 2020.
…I’d start that investigation with Utah’s COVID-19 Response, which even Dr. Fauci has praised. Utah’s Covid infection mortality rate approaches flu levels (around .1%) when you factor in CDC's estimate that Covid-19 infections could be 10 times higher than confirmed cases. Yes, the state is relatively young, affluent, compliant and healthy. Then again, Salt Lake City is a big city and it has weathered the Covid-19 storm rather well.