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I suspect that WestJet and its employees will suffer huge negative consequences as a result of their unnecessary disruption of the lives of thousands of Canadians over an issue that they were able to resolve in just 24 hours of real negotiation. Neither I nor (so far as I am aware) anyone I know had our holiday travels disrupted, and yet I still feel a sense of outrage (despite having had, in my time, to make similarly disruptive decisions affecting the lives of others).

Source: WestJet and CUPE reach tentative agreement, ending job action, flight disruptions

It may be true that higher education is losing the public’s trust, but this article “has to be read to be believed. No, strike that, I’ve read it(*) three times, and I am still struggling to convince myself that it’s real” [(*)Not only that, but also some of the misrepresented paywalled references] What is particularly “bizarre” and “clueless” is the author’s obsession with the question of whether or not sex is binary(#) – and whether or not it would be appropriate for an anthropology conference to include a panel advocating study based on the assumption that it is.

Of course it may be appropriate for anthropologists to look at how the false belief that sex is a binary characteristic affects the development of some cultures, but since many cultures do not make that mistake it would be wrong for anthropologists themselves to take the binary perspective so it may have been perfectly reasonable to reject the workshop.

It also may be true that the explanation of the rejection given in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education was not optimal, and that the academic world as a whole has done a poor job of explaining complex (and sometimes counter-intuitive) things in simple terms. But a more credible article would have made some effort to identify how the explanation might have been improved.

(#) The fact that the joint distribution of several human characteristics is strongly bimodal may justify the claim that there are just two clearly identified “sexes”, but the existence of individuals who (for a whole variety of different reasons) do not clearly fall into either of those makes it immediately obvious (except in societies where the acknowledgement of such individuals is actively suppressed) that there is not a binary classification of all humans as one or the other.

Source: Opinion | Higher education is losing the public’s trust – The Washington Post

A Quoran asks: What is gravity? Does it work like Sir Newton said or Like Sir Einstein said? Which definition is more accurate?

Gravity is the name we give to the fact that all (uncharged) matter tends to clump together.

For normal objects (including apples, moons, planets and stars) moving at normal speeds it works (so far as we can detect with normal instruments) exactly like Sir Newton said; but for objects moving more than a hundred thousand times the speed of sound (like subatomic particles in a high energy accelerator) or for very precise measurements over long periods of time (like observing the orbit of Mercury over many decades or coordinating the timing of super-accurate atomic clocks on GPS satellites) we can detect subtle differences. Most of these differences are consistent with what ‘Sir’ Einstein said, so that version is more accurate.

But whether or not it really works exactly like that is not certain, and in fact some observations (such as the rotation speeds of some galaxies) may not exactly fit (but we don’t yet know whether that means we need a new theory or just that there is more massive stuff in those galaxies than we thought there was). And also, since it’s not a “quantum” theory it may have to be modified in order to correctly describe how it works with elementary particles.

Isaac Newton first suggested that the way matter clumps together can be described by assigning a number (called “mass”) to each object and then, for each object, adding up acceleration vectors pointing towards all of the other objects whose magnitudes are proportional to the masses of the target objects and inversely proportional to the squares of the distances. This rule works perfectly well for the initial acceleration of objects that are stationary relative to one another – and before the invention of super-accurate atomic clocks, no deviation from it was ever detectable for macroscopic objects moving for short times at any achievable speed.

Albert Einstein noted that if the relationship between electricity and magnetism were to have the same form (and so to give the same apparent speed of light) for all observers, then space and time would have to be related in such a way that events which appear simultaneous to one observer might seem to be at different times for another observer who is moving relative to the first. (This relationship can be interpreted as a kind of “geometry” for the combined four dimensional space-time combination.)

In attempting to come up with a modification of Newton’s theory that fit with this, Einstein was led to a version which can be expressed in terms of how mass affects the relationship between space and time (in a way that can be interpreted as adding curvature to the “geometry”). And, as mentioned above, no observation has yet ruled out the possibility that this theory might really be exact.

Source: (1002) Alan Cooper’s answer to What is gravity? Does it work like Sir Newton said or Like Sir Einstein said? Which definition is more accurate? – Quora

If, despite lowering standards only half the population gets to experience post-secondary indoctrination, then indeed this might drive an unhealthy bifurcation of political orientation. Perhaps we need a more universally shared experience for young adults – such as required period of quasi-military public service (including perhaps the proposed environmental disaster response force), during which more interaction between the various echo chambers might be encouraged.

Source: (1) We asked too much of the American university

Do rules against insider trading really not prohibit the sale of insider information to third parties in advance of its public release?!!!

Source: Trump Media to Sell Real-Time Truth Social Feed to Traders – WSJ

Roger Pielke Jr. has a long history of what some see as casting doubt on the need for prompt reduction of our CO2 emissions but which he categorizes just as exposing false and/or misleading claims (and sometimes even scientific malpractice) by advocates of climate action. This has led to great animosity and lawsuits between Pielke and some climate activists (esp Michael Mann ) and he claims to have been hounded out of various academic roles as a result.

He does not deny either the reality of anthropogenic global warming or the need for prompt action to reduce our emissions, but many of his followers do and he seems to make little effort to discourage them. And some of his complaints strike me as exaggerated to the point of verging on dishonesty.

This raises a conundrum in my mind regarding my ongoing concern with how we should react to wrong arguments for things that are true.

It is important to reject false arguments for things that are true, but if the true facts are important then it is also necessary to always accompany the exposure of a false argument with a correct and convincing argument for the same conclusion.

(NB An earlier version of this post was published in July of 2024)

Source: Why Climate Misinformation Persists – by Roger Pielke Jr.

The certainty with which “expert” opinions are expressed to the public on matters of public policy import is almost always greater than that with which the “experts”, if speaking honestly, would admit to one another. And on the other hand, those “experts” (and others) who distrust the “consensus” frequently exaggerate the extent and sources of doubt. But in this case I agree with Pielke that even if one has just a 10% credence in the lab leak origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (as apparently was the case for at least some of the authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper), then that should by no means be considered as “case closed” and should motivate a much more serious investigation into whether or not a breach actually occurred, and into the effectiveness (and faithful application) of containment protocols in the research community as a whole.

Source: “We Just Need to Re-Convince Ourselves It’s Coincidence”

It is important to identify and reject both false arguments for a position one believes to be true and claims which make a false extension of that position. But when someone professing to be an “Honest Broker” focuses exclusively on such rejections on one side of an argument it becomes hard not to suspect that they are engaged in some kind of covert support for those who deny the position they claim to agree with.

This suspicion is strengthened when the rejected extreme position is not actually being put forward – except by the “Honest Broker” himself as a straw man to be cut down.

A case in point is the analogy drawn by some between CO2 emissions and a thermostat. No-one has suggested that reducing CO2 emissions now would have any immediate effect on heat wave intensity or frequency but rather just that if we don’t cut emissions then there is a good chance that the heat waves will get worse. In terms of the analogy there is a furnace but no AC and the thermostat has been turned up so the furnace is on. Turning it down is essential to prevent further heating but will not immediately make us cooler.

Of course Pielke is correct that the thermostat analogy would be wrong if it was thought to control air conditioning as well as a furnace, but noone without AC expects that turning down the thermostat will immediately cool an overheated house. He is also correct that in some cases reducing combustion might temporarily increase some temperatures due to reduced aerosols, and that local temperature spikes might be mitigated in various ways (eg by water flow adjustments, vegetation and other land use changes, etc). But none of that is new news and the fact remains that the extent of the mitigation required will keep on increasing so long as the “thermostat” is pointing into the red zone.

Pielke includes a disclaimer that “Getting to net zero still makes sense even though it is not a solution to heat waves or other extreme weather events . . .The fact that carbon dioxide is not an extreme weather control knob does not weaken the case for reducing emissions.” But his claim that “many climate advocates are justifying their calls for net zero based on a false promise — that emissions reductions will improve the weather” is itself false – and serves only to unfairly malign the credibility of all “climate advocates”.

Source: Why Cutting Emissions Can’t Fix Europe’s Heat Waves

The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis if often touted as some kind of necessary extension of current thinking about Biology. However is not a theory but rather just a “conceptual framework” or metaphor. And in fact, I see no reason not to expect that “the Modern Synthesis is already flexible enough to absorb these concepts without needing a ‘new’ framework”.

Indeed, it’s a mistake to suggest that anyone serious considers random genetic mutations as “driving” evolution, or that “DNA dictates everything upward, and nothing changes DNA backward”. The fact that “physiological, top-down signals from the cell and the tissue can actively dictate how genes behave and inherit traits” is well known and can be understood to be something that evolved purely by the process of natural selection. And if ever evolution eventually gets managed by some organism making deliberate changes to its own and other genomes (and epigenomes) then, although it may make sense and be more efficient as a prediction tool to use the idea of the managers’ motivation as a “causal” factor, the fact will remain that the whole process could also be “explained” as a result of natural selection having acted on random mutations with the effect (but not the “goal”) of eventually producing a species with that directive capacity. (But, even if that capacity leads to some period of dominance by its possessors, it will not have been selected for until already achieved and the selective pressures leading up to it were for characteristics and behaviours that gave other advantages rather than with having such intelligent self design in “mind” from the outset.)

What I will agree with the EES proponents on, though, is that there may have been a brief period when it was considered possible that DNA might be the only carrier of hereditary information in an organism, and that failure to discuss alternatives may contribute to a sense that none exist. The main reason for not discussing alternatives in justifications for Natural Selection as an explanation for evolution is just that DNA is the most easily understood mechanism of inheritance and is known to be mutable at a rate which is sufficient for selection from random mutations of DNA alone to be sufficient to explain much of the variety of life forms around us. The fact that some mutations may be due to changes in the epigenetic environment rather than just in the DNA sequence itself only increases the plausibility of the basic thesis that natural selection applied to the effects of random mutation is a sufficient explanation for that variety.

Source: (1002) Why does this Space rarely talk about the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES)? Most of our discussions here do a fantastic job of debunking creationist ‘random chance’ myths by explaining the beautiful, non-random power of natural selection. But –

My own question requires one less word than that posed by former Bloomberg columnist and now Substack writer Noah Smith.

But his concern that writing for a Substack is less “conversational” than his previous role surprises me. There are certainly problems with the subscription model, but it does seem to provide ample opportunity for conversation by responding to comments, notes, and restacks. Perhaps though Smith is less interested in conversation with mere readers than with his fellow elite “pundits”.

Source: Does anything I write matter anymore? – by Noah Smith

This article does present some techniques that might be useful for someone struggling with OCD or other similar conditions.

Source: How to relax your own rules and build psychological flexibility | Psyche Guides

The idea that certain kinds of political extremism and Milgram followerism are not universal but linked to a particularly “rigid” thinking style is interesting. And while the possibility that such rigidity is innate in a significant fraction of the population is scary, the alternative that greater flexibility can be learned is encouraging.

But it is unfortunate that the only reference provided in the article to techniques for increasing flexibility is focused on individuals who may want to achieve it for personal therapeutic reasons, while there is no suggested path towards increasing the amount of mental flexibility in the population at large.

Source: The thinking style that makes people vulnerable to extremism | Psyche Ideas

Scott Santens has a good idea when he says “Tax Stock the Way Companies Already Issue It” (ie by requiring an annual dilution rate in favor of the UBI distribution). But I suspect that the number of people who would be above the cutoff for a negative net effect is higher if the analysis includes those with retirement income coming from large group pension funds.
And I also think that we should not neglect the option of taxing all wealth transfers (including inheritances and gifts) as income in the year received.

Source: (2) Comments – How Do We Pay for Universal Basic Income? Tax Stock the Way Companies Already Issue It.

The article Science Media Amplifies Male Scientists’ Voices Over Female Ones (from ‘The Scientist‘) is an embarrassment to the cause it purports to serve.

It is true and regrettable that women are underrepresented in the sciences as a whole – and at the senior levels even in broad areas (such as health sciences as a whole) where they may actually constitute a majority. But the claim that science media are selecting against them is not supported by the observation that they are cited less frequently unless their deficit in citations is greater than might be explained by that in seniority.

By appearing to assume that it is, the author of the article discredits not just herself and her journal, but also the very idea of women’s capacity for serious thinking.

Source: Science Media Amplifies Male Scientists’ Voices Over Female Ones | The Scientist

A recent article in Scientific American promotes the views of someone who “has spent his entire career championing and extending de Broglie’s views” and “recently spoke to Scientific American about his lonely(!) path and why de Broglie might have been on to something” without any specific acknowledgement that the vast majority of physicists are well aware of this “pilot wave” theory and do not believe that there is any significant chance that it “might explain what’s wrong with quantum mechanics“.

Source: A 100-year-old theory might explain what’s wrong with quantum mechanics | Scientific American

YES (but).

The best answer so far (to this Quora question) has been suppressed (perhaps by a downvote), but here’s my version.

The “wiring” is not for religion per se (and certainly not for any particular version), but religious beliefs of various kinds are a frequent consequence of a couple of features of the human brain that have clear survival value and so have been subject to enhancement by natural selection.

One, which has been noted in many answers, is a tendency to attribute agency to any observed phenomenon. The survival cost of wrongly ignoring the sound of rustling leaves is much greater than that of wrongly imagining that it might be caused by a predator. So it is not surprising that we are liable to wrongly imagine that the rising sun also is caused by the will of some conscious agent.

Another, which has been mentioned less frequently in the answers and is admittedly a bit controversial(*) among evolutionary theorists, is our tendency to band together in competing groups of not necessarily related individuals and to identify allies and enemies by shared features that may go beyond what we inherit as individuals – such as for example bodily decorations by paint, tattoo, uniforms, gang or team colours, etc. as well as ritual behaviours and profession of shared “beliefs” (with silly and irrational ones perhaps being even more effective at indicating mutual loyalty).

A third, which may be just an extension of the second, is our propensity to suppress our own judgement and follow designated group leaders, not just by force of direct dominance but also via the delegated authority of intermediaries – which I suspect may have been what gave the modern “Cro Magnon(?)” humans an advantage over the possibly bigger-brained Neanderthals by enabling the cohesion of bigger tribal groups.

(*) – As an addendum I would note that the controversy among evolutionary theorists is with regard to the existence and importance of “group selection”, and that I do indeed have a definite opinion on this.

Source: (1002) Alan Cooper’s answer to Can evolutionary biology explain why human brains are wired for religious belief? – Quora

It’s not that scientists are immune to having silly ideas and/or falling prey to invalid arguments. But they are all subject to possible experimental disproof of their predictions and, perhaps as a result of having to often admit they are wrong, their community is also reasonably rigorous about noticing and reaching consensus about rejecting invalid arguments (even when they seem to make correct predictions).

Philosophers, on the other hand, perhaps due to not having the benefit of frequent exposure to irrefutable correction, seem unable to reach a consensus rejecting even the most egregious examples of silly invalid argument (despite advertising themselves to the world as the go-to experts on checking validity).

A case in point is the claim that Infinite Dust Specks Are Worse Than One Torture.

The account linked to above repeats a couple of major errors that are common in pseudo-mathematical analyses of ethical problems.

One is the assumption that there is an actual ordered quantity that reflects the net well being or pain level of an individual. But this is almost surely not the case. It is quite possible and even seems most likely that our feeling about an experience has several independent components and that our ranking of experiences suffers from the same kind of non-transitivity as is known to lead to “paradoxical” effects in multi-candidate elections where it is indeed possible that the electorate can, in two way races prefer A to B and B to C but still prefer C to A. And it is also possible that both our relative weightings of the criteria and our rankings according to each criterion are not constant and are affected by many things such as our recent experience and even just hormones and brain chemistry.

Another is the fact that many philosophical analyses of ethical problems ignore the existence of empathy and so talk as if it is possible to torture one individual without causing emotional pain to others who know about it or at least as if for any torture that happens there is no chance that it may become widely known about. But it is easy to construct models in which the potential suffering caused by knowledge of the torture is included in the analysis in such a way that, for everyone, the expected gain from elimination of the torture of one other is much greater than the pain of a dust mote.

Source: Infinite Dust Specks Are Worse Than One Torture (by Bentham’s Bulldog on Substack)

Once again a Quoran tries to ask a “gotcha” question about the fact that geologically recent ice cores show CO2 lagging temperature over the last few glaciation periods.

One key point is that it is NOT true that temperature rises always precede the rise in CO2. As noted by Richard Rothwell (6years ago!) “If the trigger event is an increase in CO2 due to a massive increase in volcanic activity, then CO2 will rise first and the temperature rise will follow.” And as pointed out by Elijah Williams (3years ago) a good example of this is the Permian Extinction event when “Massive volcanic emissions increased CO2 from around 400ppm to over 2000 (maybe even over 6000) ppm over the course of 75 thousand years. This caused rapid increases in temperature, ocean hypoxia and acidification, and very nearly did render Earth uninhabitable. ‘The Great Dying’ wiped out over 80% of all genera and is the greatest extinction event we know of.”

Another example of CO2 increase preceding temperature rise is happening right now. We can see that CO2 has been going up more and more rapidly for a couple of centuries, but it is only within the last 50 years or so that the consequent increase in temperature has become undeniably measurable (even though any competent physicist could have told you it was bound to follow – at least since Arrhenius did an approximate calculation in 1896).

But as the ice cores show, it can also go the other way because A causes B does not necessarily mean that B does not cause A.

Of course, when B does also cause A we get what is called positive feedback and the risk of testing how far that might go by playing FAFO with the CO2 vs Temperature situation is somewhat more serious than a burned out amplifier in your sound system.

Source: (1002) Alan Cooper’s answer to What real hard evidence do we have that CO2 is actually driving the increase in temperature? We know from ice core samples that initial temperature rises always preceded the rise in CO2 by several centuries. Correlation is not causation. – Quora

Source: What About the Ice Cores? – Physics Notes

This article is complete nonsense! What the evidence shows is just that more modern humans descend from Neanderthal Dad and Human Mom (NDHM) than vice versa. This says NOTHING about the frequency of actual pairings. All it says is that more descendants of NDHM pairings ended up in Human Tribes than those of HDNM pairings. Or in blunter terms that there were more cases of Humans raped by Neanderthals or Neanderthal males being adopted into Human tribes than of Neanderthal women adopted into Human tribes. Nothing in the evidence rules out either mass rape of Neanderthals by Humans or of Human males joining and mating into Neanderthal tribes. All that is ruled out is widespread adoption of Neanderthal women and their children into Human tribes. Source: Neanderthal dad, human mum: study reveals ancient procreation pattern

I don’t know why paedophilia (as an urge) should be treated differently from any other tendency towards intolerable behaviour.

According to our current standards, if the threat of imprisonment or other punishment is enough to deter the behaviour, then it is indeed considered appropriate. But if psychiatric assessment of the perpetrator convinces the court that the compulsion is so strong as to be undeterred by such threats, then involuntary treatment and indefinite “non-punitive” confinement are considered an acceptable alternative.

And the question of pre-emptive identification and treatment is also much more widely relevant.

Sources: If paedophilia is a compulsion, is imprisonment the solution? | Aeon Essays

and Linking crime and genetics need not be an act of eugenics |Aeon Essays