Two Parties

I brought up the question of abortion and as usual the usual pointless discussion ensued. A couple of my conservative friends chimed in and all they could talk about is philosophy and morality. I, being a more practical sort due to my engineering training, would prefer to talk policing. Or if you will: what can government really do (besides being a criminal organization I mean)?

I'm going to start here with my own bit of philosophy. Political Philosophy.

There are two parties in America today. Those that trust government and those that don't. The trusters are all the Ds and half the Rs.

And then there are the rest of us.

Yeah. The R trusters are different. "We only trust government for some things. Far fewer things than the Ds - that is for sure." Forgetting the problem of mission creep. How did fighting drugs morph into peeing into a bottle for a job? One of those unexpected mysteries of life to be sure.

Back to the morality question.

The morality is obvious. (In rich countries with plenty of food anyway).

What is also obvious is that policing such a ban will get very ugly.

I can't wait to see what the Pregnancy Enforcement Administration (PEA) will look like. It will be staffed with PEA brains to be sure. But will they require women to pee in a bottle weekly for the PEA? The Drug War precedent says yes. I'm not totally against such a move. It will be a great libertarian recruiting tool.

There is only one (so far) Pro-Life Organization I have found that says it is not the business of government to change hearts and minds on this subject. It is theirs:

Rockford Pro Life

I'm hoping this attitude will catch on.

Addressed to my pro life friends:

The government is barely able to keep order on the streets. And you want them to police the most intimate (available) part's of your or your mate's and daughter's anatomy?

Are you nuts?

Well not nuts exactly. It is a mental illness though. Faith in Government.

Again to my Pro-Government friends:

I worry about fellers like you. You have the best of intentions. And then the Democrats get in and use every power you have given government against you.

Idiots.

Or perhaps I should rephrase that. Government lovers. There is some evidence it is a genetic defect. Currently uncurable. My condolences.

And a parting thought. But first a little background. I had been discussing with one of my pro life friends the escalation of the Drug War to the point that SWAT Teams are going after defaulters on student loans. My friend said it was not about vaginas and vagina police (people who believe in government seem to have very limited imaginations).

Of course you are right my friend. It is not about vaginas. But if you get your way it will be.

The scene of the crime will need to be searched extensively by those forensically trained and if not the trained then who ever is available. Murder is a very serious crime and the evidence in this case is the body of the perpetrator. Police will at least need to watch the evidence being gathered to insure the chain of custody. This is some serious s***. You don't stint on murder investigations. Especially with 100 million potential criminals to keep an eye on.

And what happens when police go into the crime prevention mode?

What happens if the woman decides not to eat right and there is nothing where there was once something. There will need to be a law. And watchers. Perhaps a special badge for pregnant women so we can all be our sister's and children's keepers.

===

Are you forgetting what the Drug War has done for SWAT teams? Watch those student loans buddy. You don't want the 3 AM knock followed by the flash bang grenades and possible accidental discharge of automatic weapons just because your student loans are not up to date.

The Government starts with a mission and then the mission creeps. And pretty soon the power you gave to government to protect you is being used against you. Best to give them as little power as possible. The same attitude you would have towards any Criminal Enterprise.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Shoddy Furniture

“If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies…. It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.” – Albert Einstein

Ashamed of shoddy furniture? I'm glad to have any furniture.

I am ashamed of shoddy ideas (I've had more than a few). To lessen the shame I drop the shoddy ones as soon as I'm convinced of their ill worth. Sometimes the convincing is not easy. It shouldn't be.

Postmodern Robotics

I came across a most interesting discourse on reality. Technical reality to be exact.

Our precise aim is to show that there is no such thing as a robot; that a robot is no more a machine than a statue is a living being; that is merely a product of the imagination, of man’s fictive powers, a product of the art of illusion. Nevertheless, the notion of the machine in present-day culture incorporates, to a considerable extent, this mythic representation of the robot.

Well I have some news for the writer:

Yes. It is true. Robots only exist in the imagination. And yet from time to time factory robots kill people. I guess they were killed by imagination.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is a difference.

The moral is: You need to be more careful around real robots than theoretical ones.

It is a wonder that people who think like that can even flush a toilet. Or understand the need to.

Which reminds me.

“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” — John W. Gardner, Saturday Evening Post, December 1, 1962

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Mamet Goes Conservative

This is kind of old news, but I need a post today. So here goes. I used to know David Mamet from his time helping to get the St. Nicholas Theater on Halsted Street in Chicago going. I was actually living in the theater at the time and helped them set up their sound system. I got to watch the play "American Buffalo" from the windows in our 2nd floor "apartment". I have heard rumors that I was the inspiration for the radio engineer in his play "The Water Engine". I knew Bill Macy rather well at the time. In any case, back in the day he and I were liberals. However, it looks like his outlook has changed. As has mine. David is discussing a play he wrote, "November", where the two main characters in it are a conservative and a liberal:

The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

Yes. We were all children of the 60s back then (1975). What changed my mind? I could see that liberalism (and its core socialism) didn't work. I'm not going to go into detail on all the events that shattered my illusions (the Vietnamese Boat People played a big part), but let me just say that my contact with the real world of business changed my mind about a lot of things. And, if you want to find out what changed Mamet's mind, read the whole thing.

H/T Instapundit

No Profit

No profit. No jobs. No taxes.

Where is the profit in that?

Richard P. Feynman

Cargo Cult Science

There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in "cargo cult science"... It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards... For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it... Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. * Caltech commencement address (1974)

Lectures on Physics

We can't define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers… one saying to the other: "you don't know what you are talking about!". The second one says: "what do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by know?" o Volume I, 8-2

Engineers

In fact, the science of thermodynamics began with an analysis, by the great engineer Sadi Carnot, of the problem of how to build the best and most efficient engine, and this constitutes one of the few famous cases in which engineering has contributed to fundamental physical theory. Another example that comes to mind is the more recent analysis of information theory by Claude Shannon. These two analyses, incidentally, turn out to be closely related.

From: Wiki Quotes

The Scientific Consensus

There are a number of reasons why scientific consensus is not definitive.

One of them is phlogiston.

Real Effort

It is astonishing what an effort it seems to be for many people to put their brains definitely and systematically to work. - Thomas A. Edison

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time. - Thomas A. Edison

Curbing Prosperity

"Any extension of the Government into business affairs -- no matter what the pretense and no matter how the extension is labeled -- will be bound to promote waste and put a curb on our prosperity and progress." --Thomas Alva Edison

Marxist Politicians

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." -- Groucho Marx

A Convenient Fiction

There is a serious misunderstanding about the state of science today. People look at all this shiny new hardware and imagine some unified state of knowledge behind it all. We have no such thing. What we actually have are islands of good enough knowledge.

There is not some great monolithic body of knowledge that can be described in a few equations understood by physics geeks and people with advanced math degrees.

Let me illustrate the problem with a recent personal anecdote. I was designing a gas valve for a fusion test reactor and commenter Brent pointed out that I had not taken into consideration something called the Knudsen Number. It was true. I had never even heard of it. The short version is: if gas pressures are low enough and the holes are small enough, you design the valve with one set of equations. If the holes are big and the pressure high you use another set of equations. In the middle? It is why engineers get paid the big bucks.

So the point of all that is that we don't have a unified knowledge set about gas flow through holes. We know a lot about aspects of this. We have islands of good knowledge and places where all is fuzziness or worse darkness.

Which brings me to a comment I made at Lubos Motl's Reference Frame, where Lubos is doing a very interesting exposition on the philosophy of science.

There is a lot of interesting work going on in the plasma physics area.

There are a lot of previously hidden self organizing principles being either discovered, re-discovered, or given new emphasis. Not just in quasi-static plasmas but dynamic ones as well.

We are starting to look at not just the frequencies of particles, but also the frequencies of assemblages of particles under the influence of various fields.

The tokamak guys are really struggling with this. They want a nice flat Maxwellian plasma and the plasma is not co-operating. It turns out that a true or even-quasi Maxwellian plasma may be impossible.

I think if we start looking at the facts, the idea of a Maxwellian plasma is a total fiction. The slightest deviation from Maxwellian distribution causes forces to build up and currents to flow.

So what we really need to make all this work is to delve into the self organizing principles of plasma and look at it from the point of view that a Maxwellian plasma is a convenient fiction for a certain class of problems.

Quotes

There is a useful quotes page at talk.polywell. I'm going to list some of my faves here (you may have seen some of them before - if I find something good I like to replicate it):

"If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn't thinking." --George S. Patton

"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we do know that just ain't so." - Artemus Ward

“The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” — John W. Gardner, Saturday Evening Post, December 1, 1962

“Strangely, it is always America that is described as degenerate and ‘fascist,’ while it is solely in Europe that actual dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up.” Jean-François Revel

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning. Source: The Book of Lies

Change is hard. The universe is full of inertia. And people who are either stupid or not interested. Sometimes both. Unrelenting effort is required. -- Simon

“Physicists dream of Nobel prizes, engineers dream of mishaps.” -- Hendrik Tennekes

"You cannot be sure you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do." -- Milton Friedman

Some people get all their pleasures from negative emotions. -- Ouspensky

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened. -- Sir Winston Churchill

"Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual." -- Thomas Jefferson

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it. -- Thomas Jefferson

Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness. -- Marcus Aurelius

[L]ook at the characters of your own associates. Even the most agreeable of them are difficult to put up with; and for that matter, it is difficult enough to put up with one's own self. -- Marcus Aurelius

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." -- Marcus Aurelius

The Servant

God is the servant of man.

Now what are we doing to be worthy of such an honor?

Dumber Than A Dead Fish

Action: Swims against the tide.

Definition: Unable to adapt to changed circumstances.

Prompted by: I Find Your Lack Of Faith Disturbing:

The big fish who were once swimming with the tide are now bucking it. The tide has changed. What is so amazing here is that even dead fish are smart enough to go with the tide.

Just A Reminder

It is unwise to attribute to malice alone that which can be attributed to malice and stupidity.

Virtue

Virtue has to be its own reward, that makes it the most poorly paid of all the professions.

Suggested by Project Gutenberg book The Pagans.

Too Much Liberty

Thomas Jefferson: "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."

Camille Paglia: "Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist."

Camille Paglia: "The only thing that will be remembered about my enemies after they're dead is the nasty things I've said about them”.

Camille Paglia: "It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behaviour, career, and sexual orientation."

From Samizdata

Cross Posted at Classical Values and at The Astute Bloggers

Orthodoxy

Over at Climate Audit they are discussing “Miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis”.

Let me relate this to my current field of study - Nuclear Fusion.

The big money is going into projects like ITER (the US is spending something like $200 to $400 mil a year on this project). All the scientists involved say we are at least 30 years away from a net power reactor delivering watts to the grid. When that net power device is built it will be too big 17GW (most power plants built today are under 100MW and the largest are in the 1 GW range), too expensive (at 20X to 30X the current cost of electricity), and too late. All this is inherent in trying to get fusion by heating things up. And yet funding rolls on. Grant money is relatively easy if there is an ITER angle.

Contrast this with IEC fusion. In the US there are 5 to 10 projects going on at a funding rate that is probably on the order of $20 million or less total. The thing about IEC Fusion is that instead of heating up a mass of gas to get fusion in the high energy tail, particles are accelerated directly to fusion speeds. This makes the devices much smaller, less costly, and quicker to develop. So who is doing IEC Fusion? Basically a bunch of old cranks who see ITER and the Tokamaks as useless except as science fair projects. Let me quote Plasma Physicist Dr. Nicholas Krall who said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good."

And yet the money rolls on.

If I was in charge of science I would see that in any discipline 70% went to mainstream and 30% to dissenters. That would tend to keep everyone honest. Does it mean some money would go for stupidity? Sure. As Murray Gell-Mann says - there is a reason most new stuff ought not get funded, most of it is flat wrong. However, if we do not encourage dissent from orthodoxy we will never learn anything new.

Our current ratios are out of balance.

Let me add that a significant part of the 30% should go towards replication by dissenters.

If we are really going to do good science we must encourage a climate of dissent and replication.

Let me add that we see this in Cold Fusion. The mainstream derided it because at first replication was difficult. Now at least the laboratory aspects are better under control and replication is the norm. We still do not understand what is happening or why. However, finally progress is being made. So far it seems to be a low energy process. Heat is created. Just not enough to even boil the water (actually D2O) in the experimental apparatus. It is being researched. We will find out why. We lost 10 years of useful work because of clinging to orthodoxy.

In many way science is like religion. Woe be unto him who strays from the canon.

Interestingly enough the US Navy is funding IEC Fusion and Cold Fusion. Why? They don't look at it from a right/wrong basis. It is all about risk vs reward. They are not crazy. They do require at least a minimum of results before funding. They come at it from: "we don't know everything" and "mathematics can be helpful but is not definitive. Only real world results count".

Why not more dependence on math? Because with math - if you pick the right assumptions - you can prove anything.

Cross Posted at Classical Values and at The Astute Bloggers

Do Not Argue With Fools

“do not argue with fools. They will drag you to their level and beat you by shear experience”

Well it is a hobby of mine. I can't help myself. And, when I run out of fools I argue with myself.

Inspired by:

Commenter Andrey Levin at Climate Audit.

Giving Up Religious Supremacism

Winds of Change is discussing a post by Ali Eteraz. His thesis is that we need to give up partisanship. That no political philosophy is better than another. Split the differences.

Ali says:

I cannot in clean conscience engage against religious supremacism and exclusion if I engage in ideological supremacism and exclusion.

Sure you can.

For the most part it is impossible to tell whether belief in God A or God B or God Ba has more merit.

However, one can measure the results of one ideology over another. Capitalism vs. Communism for instance. Or Self Government vs. Despotism.

Modern man has advanced through differentiation. You know reason. Occam's Razor and all that. We have rules for judging differences. In size. In weight. Even in opinion.

I'd hate to give all that up just so you can feel good about giving up religious supremacism.

Cross Posted at Classical Values and at The Astute Bloggers