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September 29, 2006
Water water everywhere...
Why? Oh come on, you know why:
The Jal Board estimates that consumers pay no more than 40 percent of the actual cost of water. Raising the rates is unrealistic for now, as Mr. Mathur well knows. "It would be easier to ask people to pay up more if we can make water abundantly available," he said. A proposal to privatize water supply in some neighborhoods met with stiff opposition last year and was dropped.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:43 AM | Comments (0)
September 27, 2006
Thinking outside the box
Just read an old and facinating look at some important thinkers discussing "WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT INVENTION IN THE PAST TWO THOUSAND YEARS?"
I especially liked Freeman Dyson's answer of hay. Civilization in cold places seems to owe itself to stabling hourses through the winter.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:19 PM | Comments (0)
September 25, 2006
Where are we?
You've been hld for years without trial, way beyond what time you'd serve if you'd been found guilty. Interogators ask you private questions to learn your secrets. Every time that you talk to them they make things worse for you. You aren't in a secret eastern-European prison or Gitmo, simply a victim of the modern system of medically imprisioning those deemed mentally ill. And there was once a time when I would have thought nothing of it, but then I read Szasz, and my eyes were opened.
The long and short of it is that just because medicine makes you feel better doesn't mean that the cause of discomfort is a medical issue. Just because someone acts in a non-normal manner, doesn't mean that they are sick. Sick should be reserved for problems with physical causes.
My step-mother had a copy of his book, The Myth of Mental Illness on her bookshelf, and reading it was one of the most startling reads of my life. Needless to say, he isn't popular with others in the field of mental health.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:23 PM | Comments (0)
September 22, 2006
What to do with Osama
Then take him to Tanzania, where on the same August morning Al Qaeda hit another American Embassy, killing 11 people, most of them Muslims. The terrorists excused the murder of their co-religionists by saying that the bombing took place on a Friday, when good Muslims should have been in a mosque. That would be an excellent venue to pose the question of what Islam really stands for."
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:42 PM | Comments (0)
September 21, 2006
The root cause of US racial policies?
What can we say about the results of these tests, of this experiment?
John Derbyshire calls this the Dogma of Zero Group Differences, or DZGD.
There are three things to be said about the DZGD. * First, it is empirically false. * Second, it contradicts everything we know about the natural development of populations of living creatures. * Third, it causes discord, disorder, and hatred when let loose in a multiracial society. I would go so far as to say that it is a dangerous, poisonous, and evil doctrine.· Empirically false. The empirical falsehood of the DZGD has been so often demonstrated that only a willful stubbornness, joined with an ingrained terror of being thought insufficiently “anti-racist,” could lead anyone to deny the evidence, once it has been fairly presented to him.
There is a widespread public impression that this evidence is of a scattered and dubious sort, assembled by people with axes to grind, probably for nefarious purposes. The late Stephen Jay Gould, who, as well as being a committed “anti-racist,” was a Marxist (and not a psychometrician, but a paleontologist), wrote a book to this effect, still widely read and quoted.
This impression is, however, a false one. Good-quality empirical evidence on the quantification of the human personality and human mental abilities now goes back nearly a century. All conceivable objections to this evidence on grounds of methodology have been pondered, debated, and corrected for. Researchers from all over the political spectrum, from Charles Murray, who is a libertarian conservative, to James Flynn, a liberal activist so far to the Left he fled the 1960s U.S.A. on principle to live in New Zealand, are in basic agreement on the core facts of group differences. Statistical differences in scores on various tests of personality and mental ability are as well established as the orbit of the Moon. (An academic sociologist of my acquaintance refers to the famous one-standard-deviation black/white gap on IQ scores as “the fundamental constant of American sociology.” The statistically-challenged should note that among the mathematical consequences of this gap is the fact that at least six million black Americans score higher on IQ tests than the average nonblack American.) Because the DZGD holds such sway in the public and political spheres, the academics who know all this stuff perfectly well are mostly silent about it when confronting the general public; but get the man in his lab or study, and you will hear it all.
And the evidence is not, in fact, all locked away in technical literature. If you read a newspaper, even a liberal broadsheet like the New York Times, you cannot fail to have noticed the recurrent stories about how some city fire department, or county police department, or some other public agency with strict entrance requirements, is being sued because black applicants fail the written admission exam at far higher rates than nonblacks.
These stories have been appearing at regular intervals for thirty years, to my certain recollection, and you would have thought that the collective ingenuity of a mighty and populous nation would by now have figured out the cause of them, and the proper means of correction. No, nobody can; it is a perfect bafflement! An unfathomable mystery! The only response anyone can come up with is to keep dumbing down the tests. In my local police department (Suffolk County, Long Island), after a number of lawsuits, this has now gone so far that the test questions are of the type: “What was your favorite athletic activity in high school?” Everyone passes, and applicants are then selected on a straightforward numerical quota by race. Problem solved!
(Similar remarks apply to that other hardy perennial of the broadsheet press, the story about school districts, despite heroic efforts, mysteriously failing to bring black test scores into line with nonblack ones. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, states are required by law to redouble their efforts in this regard—to advance from the merely heroic to the superhuman. States are responding in the only way they can, by cooking the books.)
· Contrary to biology. In almost any population of a living, interbreeding species, you will observe some variations between individuals. The individuals are not all identical. Some of these variations (red hair, in a human population) are heritable; some (appendectomy scars) are not. Some (fleetness of foot in prey animals, camouflage in moths) increase one’s chances of surviving and reproducing; some (poor eyesight, a defective immune system) decrease those chances.
Darwin’s great insight was that those variations that are both heritable and advantageous will increase in frequency in the population over time, because of differential breeding success. That, said Darwin, is how populations change. And if a population divides, with one part going here and breeding mainly among itself, and another part going there and doing the same, then because the two sub-populations will have different starting “menus” of variation in them (“founder effect”), and perhaps also because they are now in different environments, under different survival stresses, the environment favoring some variations and disfavoring others (“natural selection”), they will diverge from each other over time. And that, said Darwin, explains the origin of species.
The group of modern humans who emerged from Africa 50,000 or so years ago split up in just this way, and settled in various parts of the world as populations interbreeding mainly among themselves. These human groups, and subgroups, and sub-subgroups, developed their own peculiarities as a result of founder effect, natural selection, and some other minor effects I need not go into. There was nothing like enough time for speciation to occur—we are indeed all one species—but there was plenty of time for group differences to develop.
If human groups, long mostly isolated from each other, in severely different environments, and interbreeding mostly among themselves, had not developed distinctive group characteristics, that would be biologically astounding. And of course, we all know that such group characteristics exist. We can see them—skin color, hair texture, stature, muscle-to-fat ratio, epicanthic fold, and so on. Fortunately these visible group characteristics were excluded from the DZGD when we dropped the word “physical.” Phew!
Thus, the obvious, visible group differences we are all familiar with are the only ones. There are no others. There are no group differences other than physical ones. That is the DZGD.
It is, as I have said, biologically preposterous. Physical differences are not biologically “privileged” in any way. Since great swathes of our personalities and mental abilities are known, in good functional detail, to be products of brain activity, the physical/mental dichotomy is to a large degree, and perhaps entirely, an artificial one. The brain is an organ. It has an ontogeny and a phylogeny, like any other organ. We know a lot about that ontogeny and that phylogeny, and are learning more at a galloping rate.
· An evil doctrine. Why do I say that the DZGD is a dangerous and evil doctrine? It is false, to be sure; but a false doctrine need not be dangerous. If the generality of Americans came to believe that Jupiter is further away from the Sun than Neptune, they would have come to believe a falsehood; but in all probability, society would go on much as before, and only pedants would feel any distress.
Suppose you are a black American. (You might, of course, actually be a black America—no offense. If you are not, suppose you are.) Looking around, you notice all the familiar statistics of black America: the high rates of incarceration, single parenthood, and other dysfunctions. You also note that black Americans do not do very well in school (statistically speaking), do not have a fair proportion of good jobs, and so on. What is your logical deduction from all this?
If you cleave to the DZGD, as everyone from the President on down insists that you must in order to be accepted into polite society, there is only one possible conclusion you can come to: Some force is keeping black people down. Since, on the DZGD, the statistical profile of your group on all measurable abilities is just like the statistical profile of any other group, there must be some force keeping black people away from society’s goods. What other force can that be, but the malice of nonblack people? Oppression! Racism!
The DZGD thus generates discord and hatred. It is touted as a sine qua non of the modern civilized outlook. In fact it is a poisonous, anti-social doctrine, as well as a false one. How on earth did it come to have such a grip on our culture, against all the evidence of our own eyes, all the accumulated experience of the ages, and all the researches of our best minds?
The DZGD also lies behind our county’s current insouciance towards mass Third World immigration. If any ten thousand Somalians (say) are statistically indistinguishable from any ten thousand Americans, what difference does it make? It’s just a matter of numbers—and we all know that swelling numbers guarantee national wealth and success (look at China, India, Brazil,…). If the DZGD is false, then of course it may not be just a matter of numbers… but that is unthinkable, unsayable. And so the deluge continues. This is a topic all by itself, but it is well aired elsewhere, and I only want to note that the DZGD is a driving force in mass Third World immigration, as well as in inter-racial domestic discord.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 8:13 AM | Comments (0)
September 20, 2006
Is Radical Islam an existential threat to the West?
You guys know that I didn't care for Sam Harris's The End of Faith. But in the LA Times on Monday he had a great analysis of the threat of Radical Islam, "Head-in-the-Sand Liberals" and you should check it out.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:17 PM | Comments (0)
September 17, 2006
Beating Harvard
I used to date a girl who went to Priceton, and so I had many opportunities to witness that Priceton students and alumni really love Priceton. Honestly, most of the people I spoke to thought getting in was the best thing that ever happened to them. My friends who went to Harvard in comparison, basically thought it was okay. My understanding from the surveys of students is that this is a widespread position. So that raises an interesting question, given a choice between Priceton and Harvard, where would you go?
From today's NY Times Ending Early Admissions: Guess Who Wins?:
A few years ago, a group of economists surveyed 3,200 top high school seniors at 500 schools across the country, asking them which colleges had admitted them and which one they would attend. With this information, the researchers could estimate how often students chose one college over another.Among those who were admitted to both Harvard and Duke — sometimes called the Harvard of the South — and who attended one of the two, about 3 percent picked Duke, according to the economists’ statistical model. Only 11 percent chose Brown, perhaps the trendiest Ivy League university in recent years, over Harvard. Princeton and Stanford win only about 25 percent of their battles with Harvard. Yale gives the stiffest competition, winning about 35 percent of the time, which in politics would be considered a crushing landslide.
Which just supports my general conclusion that smart people treat a college education as a serious investment, and that they should go where they can get the best combination of education and prestige to maximize the value of their degrees. Little surprise then, that one of the smartest subsets of the American population treats it similarly.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:59 PM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2006
Clarity through confusion
It is possible to understand classical physics in much the way that we think of quantum mechanics. At first this will make things much worse, but in understanding this relationship, we will have greater insight into quantum mechanics. Perhaps it is not as counter-intuitive as it first appears.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:32 PM | Comments (0)
September 14, 2006
Changes in the college admission process
There are many reasons why elite colleges have come to rely on early admissions to shape their college classes. This ends up punishing poor and first time college going famlies from attending these schools because they lack the ability to commit to one school early in the application process.
In an extensive article on the subject in The Atlantic Monthly back in 2001, it was mentioned a critical step to curtailing this practice would be for Harvard to abandon the practice "It's all about Harvard, it really is," Mark Davis, of Exeter, told me. "If they didn't have an early program, then others would feel comfortable following suit."
Well look what happened, Harvard Ends Early Admission. Keep an eye out for big changes on the collge application world.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:22 PM | Comments (0)
What if pre-flight announcements were truthful?
A funny article from The Economist.
Please ensure that your seat belt is fastened, your seat back is upright and your tray-table is stowed. At Veritas Airways, your safety is our first priority. Actually, that is not quite true: if it were, our seats would be rear-facing, like those in military aircraft, since they are safer in the event of an emergency landing. But then hardly anybody would buy our tickets and we would go bust.
...Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, but please do not remove it now. In fact, do not bother to look for it at all. In the event of a landing on water, an unprecedented miracle will have occurred, because in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero.
...Once we have reached cruising altitude you will be offered a light meal and a choice of beverages-a word that sounds so much better than just saying 'drinks', don't you think? The purpose of these refreshments is partly to keep you in your seats where you cannot do yourselves or anyone else any harm. Please consume alcohol in moderate quantities so that you become mildly sedated but not rowdy. That said, we can always turn the cabin air-quality down a notch or two to help ensure that you are sufficiently drowsy.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:07 PM | Comments (0)
September 13, 2006
Online in my office
I've finally had my box setup in my office, so posts should be more frequent than of late.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 7:47 PM | Comments (0)
September 9, 2006
Possible solution to the eminant domain problem
After Kelo v. City of New London, a lot of discussion went into how we could fix the situation so that abuses in eminent domain became more infrequent. What if we changed the rule so that once the property was assembled into a coherent whole, there had to be a public auction for the parcel. That would prevent low-ball, sweet insider deals for the property, and allow rival policy coalitions. If you thought the policy purpose was essential, you could still have a general requirement that the property be developed for a certain purpose, like a highway, or residences, but this would ensure a high value version of whatever was proposed.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:03 PM | Comments (0)
Republican's simply have a bigger tent
From today's Times in To Hold Senate, G.O.P. Bolsters Its Most Liberal
In an extraordinary pre-emptive announcement, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has said it will concede Rhode Island to the Democrats should Stephen Laffey, the mayor of Cranston, defeat Mr. Chafee in the primary.Citing poll data, Republican leaders said they saw no way someone as conservative as Mr. Laffey could win in a state as Democratic as this; as it is, they are increasingly worried about Mr. Chafee’s hopes in a general election.
Could you imagine the Democrats doing this? The way they turned on the highly electable Lieberman, I cannot.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:43 PM | Comments (0)
September 8, 2006
Superstition can be good for you
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:47 PM | Comments (0)
September 7, 2006
Some good news on the immigration front
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:36 PM | Comments (0)