It's not easy to write about pseudo science. The problem has to do with
the fluid nature of the concept. It has no single, precise meaning and there
is little agreement about its constituent elements. It involved subjugation
of scientific aims to political and deliberate attempt in deception and
subsequent cover up. But recently almost all science became political and
all politics involved deception: to say that a politic is not lying is the
same as to say that an alcoholic is not drinking. Still there are different
degrees of lies with Lysenkoism probably representing one of the most extreme
cases.
One of the most dangerous is those deception schemes use by pseudoscience
is one that trades the independence for political influence, the power grab.
The scientific community
is generally held together and all its affairs are peacefully managed through
its joint acceptance of the same fundamental scientific beliefs.Science
is best practiced in a voluntary, peaceful and free atmosphere. What
really matters as far as politics and science is concerned is what type
of environment the individual scientists have to work in and what degree
of freedom they can enjoy. As by Frederick Seitz noted in his
The Present Danger To Science and Society
The rise of 'Lysenkoism' in the Soviet Union in the late 40th of the
twentieth century is one of the most tragic pages of the history of science.
Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist, came to prominence as the proponent
of a theory of heredity that stood in direct opposition to Mendelianism.
The details of this theory need not concern us, except to note that it was
'Larmarckist' in its contention that it is possible for organisms to inherit
acquired characteristics. This was wrong and the principles of Mendelianism
- the theory of heredity - were well understood by then. But Lysenko theory
fitted nicely with the Soviet ideology. Particularly, the idea that acquired
characteristics could be inherited held out the promise of the perfectibility
of mankind. So the state intervened in the scientific struggle and the consequences,
certainly for many of the scientists involved and arguably also for the
USSR agriculture, were disastrous. The power of state was used to suppress
dissidents. Many scientists were exiled; some killed.
Unfortunately we
cannot dismiss the obviously pernicious use of ideology by Lysenko and his
supporters simply as an aberration of the era that is often brushed aside
as 'the cult of personality' (with or without naming the personality in
question). This proved to be much more dangerous and at the same time remarkably
resilient phenomenon that survived the dissolution of the USSR. Do not fool
yourself that it somehow was connected with communist ideology. The link
was poorly accidental. In reality Lysenkoism emerged as a new religious
of control freaks with high position in government. Moreover a lot of administrators
in academic institutions belong to the category of
micromanagers and as such they are naturally predisposed to Lysenkoism.
In general "Lysenkovisation of science" occurs when the state tries
to control both the methodologies and goals of scientific activity. For
example in the USSR huge bureaucratic institutions such as VASKhNIL and
VIEM had been set up to control resources and, especially, scientific press.
Part of the reason that Lysenkoism gained official support in the Soviet
Union was because the Mendelian approach to genetics contradicted official
ideology, in particular to Engels's dialectical materialism. In early 50th
just before his death Stalin began to sense that Lysenkoism can hinder practical
science by interfering with the academic atmosphere of toleration of dissent
most conducive to scientific accomplishment. He even went as far as to declare
that “no science can develop and
proper without the clash of opinions, without freedom of criticism.”
But it was too late...
Other governments are also far from being immune from this kind of tendency
to select between scientific theories on the basis of ideology rather than
the balance of evidence.
More benign variant of Lysenkoism that does not rely on the power of
the state is usually called Cargo Cult
Science. Another related term is
"Mayberry Machiavellis". A long time ago -- well, actually it was just
a year, but it seems like a lot longer than that -- a former Bush
advisor John DiIulio got into quite a bit of trouble for revealing to
Esquire that the White House did not possess, in any conventional definition
of the term, a
policy-making process:
Dan Gardner - Senior Writer for The Ottawa Citizen writes: "Cabinet meetings
were scripted, Mr. O'Neill discovered, by White House staffers who sent
advance notes to cabinet secretaries telling them when they were 'supposed
to speak, about what, and for how long.'" Is this the shadow of Politburo
or what?
... ... ...
It isn’t simply “Wall Street greed,” which Senator
John McCain has blamed for the crisis. Coming from Mr.
McCain, a longtime champion of financial industry deregulation,
it was a puzzling attribution,
squarely at odds with the cherished belief of free-market
enthusiasts everywhere that unbridled pursuit of self-interest
promotes the common good. As Adam Smith wrote in
“The Wealth of Nations,” “It is not from the benevolence of the
butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but
from their regard to their own interest.”
Greed underlies every market outcome, good or bad. When
important conditions are met, greed not only poses no threat to
Smith’s “invisible hand” of competition, but is an essential
part of it.
The forces that produced the current crisis actually reflect
a powerful dynamic that afflicts all kinds of competitive
endeavors. This may be seen clearly in the world of sports.
Consider a sprinter’s decision about whether to take anabolic
steroids. The sprinter’s reward depends not on how fast he runs
in absolute terms, but on how his times compare with those of
others. Imagine a new drug that enhances performance by
three-tenths of a second in the 100-meter dash. Almost
impossible to detect, it also entails a small risk of serious
health problems. The sums at stake ensure that many competitors
will take the drug, making it all but impossible for a drug-free
competitor to win. The net effect is
increased health risks for all athletes, with no real gain for
society.
This particular type of market failure occurs when two
conditions are met. First, people confront a gamble that offers
a highly probable small gain with only a very small chance of a
significant loss. Second, the rewards received by market
participants depend strongly on relative performance.
These conditions have caused the
invisible hand to break down in multiple domains.
In unregulated housing markets, for example, there are
invariably too many dwellings built on flood plains and in
earthquake zones. Similarly, in unregulated labor markets,
workers typically face greater health and safety risks.
It is no different in unregulated financial markets, where
easy credit terms almost always produce an asset bubble. The
problem occurs because, just as in sports, an investment fund’s
success depends less on its absolute rate of return than on how
that rate compares with those of rivals.
If one fund posts higher earnings than others, money
immediately flows into it. And because managers’ pay depends
primarily on how much money a fund oversees, managers want to
post relatively high returns at every moment.
One way to bolster a fund’s return is to invest in slightly
riskier assets. (Such investments generally pay higher returns
because risk-averse investors would otherwise be unwilling to
hold them.) Before the current crisis, once some fund managers
started offering higher-paying mortgage-backed securities,
others felt growing pressure to follow suit, lest their
customers desert them.
Warren E. Buffett warned about a similar phenomenon during
the tech bubble. Mr. Buffett said he wouldn’t invest in tech
stocks because he didn’t understand the business model.
Investors knew him to be savvy, but the relatively poor
performance of his
Berkshire Hathaway fund during the tech stock run-up
persuaded many to move their money elsewhere. Mr. Buffett had
the personal and financial resources to weather that storm. But
most money managers did not, and the tech bubble kept growing.
A similar dynamic precipitated the current problems. The new
mortgage-backed securities were catnip for investors, much as
steroids are for athletes. Many money managers knew that these
securities were risky. As long as housing prices kept rising,
however, they also knew that portfolios with high concentrations
of the riskier assets would post higher returns, enabling them
to attract additional investors. More important, they assumed
that if things went wrong, there would be safety in numbers.
PHIL GRAMM, the former senator from Texas, and other
proponents of financial industry deregulation insisted that
market forces would provide ample protection against excessive
risk. Lenders obviously don’t want to make loans that won’t be
repaid, and borrowers have clear incentives to shop for
favorable terms. And because everyone agrees that financial
markets are highly competitive, Mr. Gramm’s invocation of the
familiar invisible-hand theory persuaded many other lawmakers.
The invisible hand breaks down, however, when rewards depend
heavily on relative performance. A high proportion of investors
are simply unable to stand idly by while others who appear no
more talented than them earn conspicuously higher returns. This
fact of human nature makes the invisible hand an unreliable
shield against excessive financial risk.
Where do we go from here?
Many people advocate greater transparency in the market for
poorly understood derivative securities. More stringent
disclosure rules would be good but would not prevent future
crises, any more than disclosing the relevant health risks would
prevent athletes from taking steroids.
The only effective remedy is to change people’s incentives.
In sports, that means drug rules backed by strict enforcement.
In financial markets, asset bubbles cause real trouble when
investors can borrow freely to expand their holdings. To prevent
such bubbles, we must limit the amounts that people can invest
with borrowed money.
Sara Palin as a vice-president would tremendous victory for religious
obscurantism in this this country. IMHO this would a slap in the face of
any academic...
Let me confess that I was genuinely unnerved by
Sarah Palin's performance at the Republican convention. Given her
audience and the needs of the moment, I believe Governor Palin's speech
was the most effective political communication I have ever witnessed.
Here, finally, was a performer who—being maternal, wounded, righteous
and sexy—could stride past the frontal cortex of every American
and plant a three-inch heel directly on that limbic circuit that ceaselessly
intones "God and country." If anyone could make Christian theocracy
smell like apple pie, Sarah Palin could.
Then came Palin's first television interview with
Charles Gibson. I was relieved to discover, as many were, that Palin's
luster can be much diminished by the absence of a teleprompter. Still,
the problem she poses to our political process is now much bigger than
she is. Her fans seem inclined to forgive her any indiscretion short
of cannibalism. However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks
of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist
who caused her to break stride, upon the camera operator who happened
to capture her fall, upon the television network that broadcast the
good lady's misfortune—and, above all, upon the "liberal elites" with
their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably
well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.
The point to be lamented is not that Sarah Palin comes from outside
Washington, or that she has glimpsed so little of the earth's surface
(she didn't have a passport until last year), or that she's never met
a foreign head of state. The point is that she comes to us,
seeking the second most important job in
the world, without any intellectual training relevant to the challenges
and responsibilities that await her. There is nothing
to suggest that she even sees a role for careful analysis or a deep
understanding of world events when it comes to deciding the fate of
a nation. In her interview with Gibson, Palin managed to turn a joke
about seeing Russia from her window into a straight-faced claim that
Alaska's geographical proximity to Russia gave her some essential foreign-policy
experience. Palin may be a perfectly wonderful person, a loving mother
and a great American success story—but she is a beauty queen/sports
reporter who stumbled into small-town politics, and who is now on the
verge of stumbling into, or upon, world history.
The problem, as far as our political process is concerned, is that
half the electorate revels in Palin's lack of intellectual qualifications.
When it comes to politics, there is a mad love of mediocrity in this
country. "They think they're better than you!" is the refrain that (highly
competent and cynical) Republican strategists have set loose among the
crowd, and the crowd has grown drunk on it once again. "Sarah Palin
is an ordinary person!" Yes, all too ordinary.
We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once
provoked by a reporter's microphone, saying things like, "I'm voting
for Sarah because she's a mom. She knows what it's like to be a mom."
Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American)
detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration
must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate
change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China,
emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations,
the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure
and Internet security … the list is long, and
Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in
order of importance, much less address any one of them.
Palin's most conspicuous gaffe in her interview with Gibson has been
widely discussed. The truth is, I didn't much care that she did not
know the meaning of the phrase "Bush doctrine." And I am quite sure
that her supporters didn't care, either. Most people view such an ambush
as a journalistic gimmick. What I do care about are all the other things
Palin is guaranteed not to know—or will be glossing only under the frenzied
tutelage of John McCain's advisers. What doesn't she know about financial
markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern
weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging
technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and
most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or
just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin's
ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years
on earth.
I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but
doesn't: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs
world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with mil-lions
of Americans—but we shouldn't be eager to give these people our nuclear
codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes
on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and
her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom,
has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn't
ready for? He wouldn't. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems
perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country—even the welfare
of our species—as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of
course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal
journey to the White House.
In speaking before her church about her son going to war in Iraq,
Palin urged the congregation to pray "that our national leaders are
sending them out on a task that is from God; that's what we have to
make sure we are praying for, that there is a plan, and that plan is
God's plan." When asked about these remarks in her interview with Gibson,
Palin successfully dodged the issue of her religious beliefs by claiming
that she had been merely echoing the words of Abraham Lincoln. The New
York Times later dubbed her response "absurd." It was worse than absurd;
it was a lie calculated to conceal the true character of her religious
infatuations. Every detail that has emerged about Palin's life in Alaska
suggests that she is as devout and literal-minded in her Christian dogmatism
as any man or woman in the land. Given her long affiliation with the
Assemblies of God church, Palin very likely believes that Biblical prophecy
is an infallible guide to future events and that we are living in the
"end times." Which is to say she very likely thinks that human history
will soon unravel in a foreordained cataclysm of war and bad weather.
Undoubtedly Palin believes that this will be a good thing—as all true
Christians will be lifted bodily into the sky to make merry with Jesus,
while all nonbelievers, Jews, Methodists and other rabble will be punished
for eternity in a lake of fire. Like many Pentecostals, Palin may even
imagine that she and her fellow parishioners enjoy the power of prophecy
themselves. Otherwise, what could she have meant when declaring to her
congregation that "God's going to tell you what is going on, and what
is going to go on, and you guys are going to have that within you"?
You can learn something about a person by the company she keeps.
In the churches where Palin has worshiped for decades, parishioners
enjoy "baptism in the Holy Spirit," "miraculous healings" and "the gift
of tongues." Invariably, they offer astonishingly irrational accounts
of this behavior and of its significance for the entire cosmos. Palin's
spiritual colleagues describe themselves as part of "the final generation,"
engaged in "spiritual warfare" to purge the earth of "demonic strongholds."
Palin has spent her entire adult life immersed in this apocalyptic hysteria.
Ask yourself: Is it a good idea to place the most powerful military
on earth at her disposal? Do we actually want our leaders thinking about
the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy when it comes time to say to the
Iranians, or to the North Koreans, or to the Pakistanis, or to the Russians
or to the Chinese: "All options remain on the table"?
It is easy to see what many people, women especially, admire about
Sarah Palin. Here is a mother of five who can see the bright side of
having a child with Down syndrome and still find the time and energy
to govern the state of Alaska. But we cannot ignore the fact that Palin's
impressive family further testifies to her dogmatic religious beliefs.
Many writers have noted the many shades of conservative hypocrisy on
view here: when Jamie Lynn Spears gets pregnant, it is considered a
symptom of liberal decadence and the breakdown of family values; in
the case of one of Palin's daughters, however, teen pregnancy gets reinterpreted
as a sign of immaculate, small-town fecundity. And just imagine if,
instead of the Palins, the Obama family had a pregnant, underage daughter
on display at their convention, flanked by her black boyfriend who "intends"
to marry her. Who among conservatives would have resisted the temptation
to speak of "the dysfunction in the black community"?
Teen pregnancy is a misfortune, plain and simple. At best, it represents
bad luck (both for the mother and for the child); at worst, as in the
Palins' case, it is a symptom of religious dogmatism. Governor Palin
opposes sex education in schools on religious grounds. She has also
fought vigorously for a "parental consent law" in the state of Alaska,
seeking full parental dominion over the reproductive decisions of minors.
We know, therefore, that Palin believes that she should be the one to
decide whether her daughter carries her baby to term. Based on her stated
position, we know that she would deny her daughter an abortion even
if she had been raped. One can be forgiven for doubting whether Bristol
Palin had all the advantages of 21st-century family planning—or, indeed,
of the 21st century.
We have endured eight years of an administration that seemed touched
by religious ideology. Bush's claim to Bob Woodward that he consulted
a "higher Father" before going to war in Iraq got many of us sitting
upright, before our attention wandered again to less ethereal signs
of his incompetence. For all my concern about Bush's religious beliefs,
and about his merely average grasp of terrestrial reality, I have never
once thought that he was an over-the-brink, Rapture-ready extremist.
Palin seems as though she might be the real McCoy. With the McCain team
leading her around like a pet pony between now and Election Day, she
can be expected to conceal her religious extremism until it is too late
to do anything about it. Her supporters know that while she cannot afford
to "talk the talk" between now and Nov. 4, if elected, she can be trusted
to "walk the walk" until the Day of Judgment.
What is so unnerving about the candidacy of Sarah Palin is the degree
to which she represents—and her supporters celebrate—the joyful marriage
of confidence and ignorance. Watching her deny to Gibson that she had
ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command
of the world's only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would
gladly assume any responsibility on earth:
"Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery
on this child's brain?"
"Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I'm an avid
hunter."
"But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as
a surgeon of any kind."
"That's just the point, Charlie. The American people want change
in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with
a challenge, you cannot blink."
The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening,
in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery.
Ask yourself: how has "elitism" become a bad word in American politics?
There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent
and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our
planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite
athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote
the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And
yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities,
we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence.
When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will
decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like
us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact,
almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent
or well educated.
I believe that with the nomination of Sarah Palin for the vice presidency,
the silliness of our politics has finally put our nation at risk. The
world is growing more complex—and dangerous—with each passing hour,
and our position within it growing more precarious. Should she become
president, Palin seems capable of enacting policies so detached from
the common interests of humanity, and from empirical reality, as to
unite the entire world against us. When asked why she is qualified to
shoulder more responsibility than any person has held in human history,
Palin cites her refusal to hesitate. "You can't blink," she told Gibson
repeatedly, as though this were a primordial truth of wise governance.
Let us hope that a President Palin would blink, again and again, while
more thoughtful people decide the fate of civilization.
Harris is a founder of The Reason Project and author of The New
York Times best sellers “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian
Nation.” His Web site is samharris.org.
Come on people. This is not XVII this XXI century. America deserves
better then that.
ANCHORAGE -- Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill
town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting
in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth
created 6,000 years ago -- about 65 million years after scientists say
most dinosaurs became extinct -- the teacher said.
After conducting a college band and watching Palin deliver a commencement
address to a small group of home-schooled students in June 1997, Wasilla
resident Philip Munger said, he asked the young mayor about her religious
beliefs.
Palin told him that "dinosaurs and humans
walked the Earth at the same time," Munger said. When he asked her about
prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin
said "she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks,"
recalled Munger, who teaches music at the University of Alaska in Anchorage
and has regularly criticized Palin in recent years on his liberal political
blog, called Progressive Alaska.
The idea of a "young Earth" -- that God
created the Earth about 6,000 years ago, and dinosaurs and humans coexisted
early on -- is a popular strain of creationism.
Though in her race for governor she called for faith-based "intelligent
design" to be taught along with evolution in Alaska's schools, Gov.
Palin has not sought to require it, state educators say
I wonder why nobody sees a strong link between creationism and communist
doctrine with its obsessive idea of central planning ;-)
Science lessons from creationism
I agree with Robert Smith (letter, 13 September) that creationism
should be taught more widely; pupils could
learn a lot by analysing the implications. I've been thinking about
the events of that busy first week in the "Young Earth" model.
Consider the challenge of creating the first chicken (on the fifth
day); an egg would be no good on its own. Would you start at the beak
and sweep backwards? You would have to be quick, or fluids would leak
out. No, it would have to be completely formed in an instant, with all
the organs and blood supply and nerves (including behaviour and memory).
The space it suddenly occupies would have to be cleared of air at exactly
the same moment to prevent a deafening shock-wave.
Creating a whale would be even more challenging; a large volume of
water would have to be removed in an instant, and not by converting
it into energy, or the planet would be blown away.
The difficulties don't stop there. All
the delicate inter-relationships between species would have to be immaculately
planned, and there would have to be fully-grown trees (the third day),
ready-rotted wood and dead animals for scavengers; nests, burrows and
much else. And this for the whole world, down to the
last ant and pine-needle, rotifer and bacillus.
That's zoology, anatomy, physiology, psychology, physics (newtonian
and nuclear) and ecology.
David Ridge
London N19
===
Hugh Dower (letter, 13 September) asserts that "creationism is a
legitimate theory, which means that natural evolution is only a theory
too". Unfortunately, this is a completely
false comparison.
His dismissal of evolution as "only" a theory confuses the
general understanding of the word theory (a conjecture or hypothesis)
with the scientific understanding (a testable and thus potentially falsifiable
explanation). And this latter point is precisely where creationism
falls down: it can never be a legitimate theory because it is
unfalsifiable, and by Karl Popper's
test is not scientific.
It would be both pointless and misleading to attempt to teach it
in science classes; we might as well teach astrology or the existence
of the tooth fairy.
Dr Richard Carter
London SW15
Was Michael Reiss appointment a special operation of the Templeton
Foundation
The Royal Society should take a much stronger stance
in opposing religion in the school lab
There are two ways of reacting to the Royal Society's claim
that its education director Michael Reiss was misrepresented
in reports alleging he thought creationism should be taught
in science classrooms. Either journalists got it wrong or Reiss
- an ordained Church of England clergyman - did indeed suggest
religious dogma be mixed with science teaching. I tend very
much to the latter view.
As Sir Harry Kroto, a society fellow,
and a Nobel prize winner, pointed out in a letter to the Royal
Society, Reiss was an accident waiting
to happen: 'I warned the president ... that his was a dangerous
appointment. I did not realise just how dangerous it would turn
out to be.'
Now the society has been caught out, though in the short
term it may ride out the current controversy. In the wake of
Reiss's remarks, most commentaries have focused, quite reasonably,
on the issue of how science and religion should be taught at
school. At the same time, the Royal
Society has rushed to assure scientists that it still believes
creationism has no place in school laboratories.
There is a second, more important issue at stake, however.
How should the Royal Society, the
world's oldest and most prestigious scientific organisation,
treat religion within the confines of its own headquarters?
Science and religion do mix, though the combination is often
volatile - the reaction often depending, intriguingly, on the
discipline studied by a particular researcher, according to
Sir Tim Hunt, winner of the 2001 Nobel prize for medicine. 'Cosmologists
and physicists dwell on cosmic forces which - if altered only
slightly - would prevent many chemical reactions, and life,
from occurring. The sheer improbability of our universe makes
them all a bit spiritual and soft on religion. By contrast,
biologists see evolution constantly at work in their research
and are more hard-nosed about God.'
The idea is not without exceptions, of course. Hunt, a biologist,
is scarcely hardline about Reiss's creationism call, for example.
'I am not worried about this one, though I am definitely anti-religious.'
But if he is unworried about God getting a foot in the Royal
Society's door, many other fellows find recent developments
troubling. Scientists such as Kroto, Sir Richard Roberts (another
UK Nobel winner), and Richard Dawkins look with horror upon
the spread of faith schools; the
growing influence of bodies such as the Templeton Foundation,
a conservative US organisation which constantly seeks to establish
links between science and religion; and the prospect
of creationism being taught in Britain's science classrooms.
They expect the Royal Society to take a tough stand on these
issues.
Many of their fears are based on their American experiences,
it should be noted. Kroto and Richards now work there while
Dawkins is a frequent visitor on the US lecture circuit. And
what they see in America unnerves them: school science teachers
who firmly believe the world and humanity are the 6,000-year-old
handiwork of God and who cannot accept what DNA tells us about
our close relationships with the animal world, what isotope
research reveals about the deep antiquity of our planet, what
astronomical studies tell us about the size and age of the universe;
and what fossils reveal about our own species' multimillion-year
lineage. The prospect of such ignorance spreading to Britain
quite rightly appals them.
'I don't know if it is too late to stop the slide in Britain
but I think it is in the US where they [the religious right]
have now almost complete control over politics, the judiciary,
education, business, journalism and television,' says Kroto.
'And it will only take a presidential victory by McCain, followed
by him having a heart attack weeks later, and Sarah Palin, a
creationist supporter, will become head of the world's most
powerful country.'
It is the duty of scientists to fight such onslaughts and
be examples of rationality in a darkening world, it is argued.
Hence the anger at the Royal Society for failing to firmly nail
its colours to its mast. The organisation has a motto: 'Nullius
in verba' (roughly, 'Take nobody's word for it'). In other words,
verify everything by experiment and think for yourself. Both
are noble aspirations. It is therefore baffling how an ordained
minister - a man committed to believing the word of God without
question - could have been asked to play a senior role in the
society. Equally, the society's acceptance of money from the
Templeton Foundation raises further concerns.
The Royal Society - which should
set the fiercest of examples in its commitment to rationality
- has shown worrying signs of spiritual sloppiness.
(Its current president, Lord Rees, is a cosmologist who attends
church 'as an unbelieving Anglican', it should be noted.) Those
of a religious persuasion might welcome this softening. I would
sound a note of caution, however.
Britain is still a broadly secular society which guarantees
freedoms not just to atheists but to all religions, no matter
how few its adherents. If we follow the example
of America then all are threatened by the rise of a powerful
Christian right.
We badly need our premier scientific society to stand firm
and present a clear vision of how our planet, our species, and
the cosmos came into existence. It needs to be unequivocal about
the wonders of nature as revealed through rational, scientific
investigation. As Douglas Adams put it: 'Isn't enough to see
that a garden is beautiful without having to believe there are
fairies at the bottom of it too?'
At the one-year anniversary, we examine reactions to the September
11, 2001, attacks in the context of other causes of premature deaths.
An objective of terrorism is to multiply damage by inducing irrational
fears in the broad population. One defense is to learn to evaluate such
situations more objectively.
Clark R. Chapman and Alan
W. Harris
Human beings might be expected to value each life, and each death,
equally. We each face numerous hazards-war, disease, homicide, accidents,
natural disasters-before succumbing to "natural" death. Some premature
deaths shock us far more than others. Contrasting with the 2,800 fatalities
in the World Trade Center (WTC) on September 11, 2001 (9/11), we barely
remember the 20,000 Indian earthquake victims earlier in 2001. Here,
we argue that the disproportionate reaction to 9/11 was as damaging
as the direct destruction of lives and property. Americans can mitigate
future terrorism by learning to respond more objectively to future malicious
acts. We do not question the visceral fears and responsible precautions
taken during the hours and days following 9/11, when there might have
been even worse attacks. But, as the first anniversary of 9/11 approaches,
our nation's priorities remain radically torqued toward homeland defense
and fighting terrorism at the expense of objectively greater societal
needs. As we obsessively and excessively beef up internal security and
try to dismantle terrorist groups worldwide, Americans actually feed
the terrorists' purposes.
Every month, including September 2001, the U.S. highway death toll
exceeds fatalities in the WTC, Pentagon, and four downed airliners combined.
Just like the New York City firefighters and restaurant workers, last
September's auto crash victims each had families, friends, critical
job responsibilities, and valued positions in their churches and communities.
Their surviving children, also, were left without one parent, with shattered
lives, and much poorer than the 9/11 victims' families, who were showered
with 1.5 million dollars, per fatality, from the federal government
alone. The 9/11 victims died from malicious terrorism, arguably compounded
by poor intelligence, sloppy airport security, and other failed procedures
we imagined were protecting us. While few of September's auto deaths
resulted from malice, neither were they "natural" deaths: most also
resulted from individual, corporate, and societal choices about road
safety engineering, enforcement of driving-while-drunk laws, safe car
design, and so on.
A Lack of Balance
Why does 9/11 remain our focus rather than the equally vast carnage
on the nation's highways or Indian earthquake victims? Some say, "Oh,
it was a natural disaster and nothing could be done, while 9/11 was
a malicious attack." Yet better housing in India could have saved thousands.
As for malice, where is our concern for the 15,000 Americans who die
annually by homicide? Apparently, the death toll doesn't matter, not
if people die all at once, not even if they die by malicious intent.
We focus on 9/11, of course, because these attacks were terroristic
and were indelibly imprinted on our consciousness by round-the-clock
news coverage. Our apprehension was then amplified when just a half
dozen people died by anthrax. Citizens apparently support the nation's
sudden, massive shift in priorities since 9/11. Here, we ask "Why?"
Suppose we had reacted to 9/11 as we did to last September's auto
deaths. That wouldn't have lessened the destroyed property, lost lives
and livelihoods, and personal bereavement of family and associates of
the WTC victims. But no billions would have been needed to prop up airlines.
Local charities wouldn't have suffered as donations were redirected
to New York City. Congress might have enacted prescription drug benefits,
as it was poised to do before 9/11. Battalions of National Guardsmen
needn't have left their jobs to provide a visible "presence" in airports.
The nation might not have slipped into recession, with resulting losses
to businesses, workers, and consumers alike. And the FBI might still
be focusing on rampant white-collar crime (think Enron) rather than
on terrorism. While some modest measures (e.g., strengthening cockpit
doors) were easy to implement, may have inhibited some "copycat" crimes,
and may even lessen future terrorism, we believe that much of the expensive
effort is ineffective, too costly to sustain, or wholly irrelevant.
Some leaders got it right when they implored Americans after 9/11
to return to their daily routines, for otherwise "the terrorists will
win." Unfortunately, such exhortations seemed aimed at rescuing the
travel industry rather than articulating a broad vision of how to respond
to terrorism. We advocate that most of us more fully "return to normal
life." We suggest that the economic and emotional damage unleashed by
9/11, which touched the lives of all Americans, resulted mostly from
our own reactions to 9/11 and the anthrax scare, rather than
from the objective damage. We recognize that our assertion may seem
inappropriate to some readers, and we are under no illusion that natural
human reactions to the televised terrorism could have been wholly averted
and redirected. We, too, gaped in horror at images of crashing airplanes
and we contributed to WTC victims. But from within the skeptical community
there could emerge a more objective, rational alternative to post-9/11.
Citizens could learn to react more constructively to future terrorism
and to balance the terrorist threat against other national priorities.
It could be as important to combat our emotional vulnerability to terrorism
as to attack Al Qaeda.
Terrorism, by design, evokes disproportionate responses to antisocial
acts by a malicious few. By minimizing our negative reactions, we might
contribute to undermining terrorists' goals as effectively as by waging
war on them or by mounting homeland defenses. We do not "blame
the victims" for the terrorists' actions. Rather, we seek that we citizens,
the future targets of terrorism, be empowered. As Franklin D. Roosevelt
famously said, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself." We can
help ensure that terrorists don't win if we can minimize our fears and
react more constructively to future terrorism. We don't suggest that
this option is easy or will suffice alone. It may not even be possible.
But human beings often best succeed by being rational when their emotions,
however tenacious and innate, have let them down.
Ran Paul raises important questions relevant to this topic
[Jun 19, 2008]
Hip Heterodoxy Christopher Hayes
It might be that the most instructive part of the article was the Card
portion.
May 24, 2007
"Card, a highly esteemed economist at the University of California,
Berkeley, caught flak for his heresy not on trade but on the minimum
wage. In 1994 he conducted a study to see whether an increase in the
minimum wage in New Jersey had the negative effect on employment that
basic neoclassical theory would predict. He found it didn't. In fact,
his regression analysis showed that, controlling for other factors,
New Jersey gained fast-food jobs after increasing its minimum wage,
compared with Pennsylvania, which hadn't raised wages. The paper attracted
a tremendous amount of attention and criticism, and Card himself largely
abandoned working on the minimum wage. In a 2006 interview, he explained
his decision to leave the topic behind this way: "I've subsequently
stayed away from the minimum wage literature for a number of reasons.
First, it cost me a lot of friends. People that I had known for many
years, for instance, some of the ones I met at my first job at the University
of Chicago, became very angry or disappointed. They thought that in
publishing our work we were being traitors to the cause of economics
as a whole."
What this brings to mind is not mafia
style omerta as much as soviet science under Stalin.
The very notion that economics as a whole has a "cause" is revealing.
As is the fact that Card felt compelled to drop that area of research.
Not exactly a model for the free market of ideas.
Freakonomists (aka neoclassical economists) might be probably considered
to be a group close in the ideology to Lysenkoists... At least people
with views similar to Milton Freedman's views (as expressed in
Capitalism and Freedom) definitely belong to the church of
"free market fraud" as John Kenneth Galbraith put it in 1999. He also warned
that ""Never underestimate the power of very stupid people in large groups."
"
May 26, 2007 |
Dani Rodrik's weblog
Sort of, says Christopher Hayes in a very well-written and very interesting
piece in The
Nation. He says orthodox economists are
a close-knit group and are quick to penalize those among them or from
outside who overstep the boundaries. Here is an excerpt:
So extreme is the marginalization of heterodox economists, most
people don't even know they exist. Despite the fact that as many
as one in five professional economists belongs to a professional
association that might be described as heterodox, the phrase "heterodox
economics" has appeared exactly once in the New York Times
since 1981. During that same period
"intelligent design," a theory endorsed by not a single published,
peer-reviewed piece of scholarship, has appeared 367 times.
It doesn't take much to call forth an impressive amount of bile
from heterodox economists toward their mainstream brethren. John
Tiemstra, president of the Association for Social Economics and
a professor at Calvin College, summed up his feelings this way:
"I go to the cocktail parties for my old schools, MIT and Oberlin,
and people are all excited about Freakonomics. I kind of
wince and go off to another corner or have another drink." After
the EPI gathering, Peter Dorman, an economist at Evergreen State
College with a gentle, bearded air, related an e-mail exchange he
once had with Hal Varian, a well-respected Berkeley economist who's
moderately liberal but firmly committed to the neoclassical approach.
Varian wrote to Dorman that there was no point in presenting "both
sides" of the debate about trade, because one side--the view that
benefits from unfettered trade are absolute--was like astronomy,
while any other view was like astrology. "So I told him I didn't
buy the traditional trade theory," Dorman said. "'Was I an astrologer?'
And he said yes!"
Hayes makes a number of good points about how ideology permeates
a lot of thinking by orthodox economists.
Anybody who strays from conventional wisdom is in danger of being
ostracized. Some years ago, when I first presented an
empirical paper questioning some of the conventional views on trade
to a high profile economics conference, a member of the audience (a
very prominent economist and a former co-author of mine) shocked me
with the question "why are you doing this?"
On the other hand I have never found neoclassical methodology too
constraining when it comes to thinking about the real world in novel
and unconventional ways. See the Carlos Diaz-Alejandro rule
here. To me it represents nothing other than a methodological predilection
for deriving aggregate social phenomena from individual behavior--and
as such it is a very useful discipline for any social science. You say
people have some preferences, they face certain constraints, take others'
actions into account, and go from there. Neoclassical economics teaches
you how to think, not what to think.
So it has always been a bit difficult for me to understand the critique
that neoclassical economics is necessarily driven by ideology or leads
to foregone conclusions. Just as it puzzles me why so many neoclassical
economists are ready to jettison what they
teach in the classroom and espouse simplistic rules of thumb on
policy.
UPDATE: Fadi, you guess right, and you win
this.
UPDATE: Peter has some very perceptive comments
in the thread below. I recommend them to all.
UPDATE: Christopher Hayes responds in an e-mail:
Your point about neoclassical economics as an approach as opposed
to a substantive set of principles is an important one, and gets
at the crux of the issue. To what point does the toolbox determine
what the carpenter fashions? If all you have is a hammer, does everything
begin to look like a nail?
Supply side economic (aka "voodoo economics") is a classic example of
cargo cult science. Steve Waldman insiteful comments on Greg Mankiw's proposal
to cut corporate taxes... (hat hit to
Mark Thoma)
Supply side fairy tales, by Steve Waldman: Greg Mankiw
offers a strong endorsement of a proposal to cut the corporate
income tax from 35 to 25 percent, claiming "It is perhaps the best
simple recipe for promoting long-run growth in American living standards."
... A good case can be made for cutting or even eliminating the
corporate income tax. But Mankiw's argument does not cohere.
Let's start positive. Mankiw is right to point out that the "incidence"
of the corporate income tax might not in fact be as progressive
as its proponents would wish. He quotes studies suggesting that
workers end up paying 70% to 92% of the taxes in the form of lower
wages. I'm skeptical of those numbers, but it is surely true that
some fraction, perhaps even a large fraction, of the corporate tax
burden falls on workers and customers rather than presumptively
wealthier investors. Mankiw does us all a service by reminding us
of this.
Then he tells us a fairy tale ...
... ... ...
Supply side economics is a nice story, a hopeful story. It offers
a clean, plausible policy framework: encourage investment, always
and everywhere, and prosperity is sure to follow. But this decade
has been about a pure a test of that idea as we could hope for.
Capital in the United States was incredibly cheap, and what did
we do? We destroyed a lot of wealth. We don't need more capital
(although we might soon, if our foreign backers get skittish). We
need more discriminating capital. In the meantime, the only thing
I'm sure "works" about the supply side story is that it shifts the
tax burden from richer to poorer. I'd rather that stop working so
well.
See also discussion
Economist's View Supply-Side Fairy Tales
Asia Times
... Milton Friedman and their followers
will be lumped together with Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, stooge
and sycophant of Josef Stalin. Lysenko
sent his fellow biologists to the Gulag, never to be heard from again,
for opposing his hare-brained theories of genetics. Lysenko betrayed
science as he betrayed humanity. He was,
no less than Stalin, a monster.
Antal E Fekete is professor emeritus, Memorial University
of Newfoundland, St John's. Further information on the Gold Standard
University can be obtained by writing to GSUL@t-online.hu.
(Copyright 2007 by A E Fekete. All rights reserved. Used by permission.)
4. Now, to the matter of Darwin. The first thing to say is that natural
selection is a scientific theory about the way evolution works in fact.
It is either true or it is not, and whether or not we like it politically
or morally is irrelevant. Scientific theories are not prescriptions
for how we should behave. I have many times written (for example in
the first chapter of A Devil's Chaplain) that I am a passionate
Darwinian when it comes to the science of how life has actually evolved,
but a passionate ANTI-Darwinian when it comes to the politics of how
humans ought to behave. I have several times said that a society based
on Darwinian principles would be a very unpleasant society in which
to live. I have several times said, starting at the beginning of my
very first book, The Selfish Gene, that we should learn to
understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to
apply it to human politics. Darwin himself said the same thing, in various
different ways. So did his great friend and champion Thomas Henry Huxley.
5. Darwinism gives NO support to racism of any kind. Quite the contrary.
It is emphatically NOT about natural selection between races. It is
about natural selection between individuals. It is true that the subtitle
of The Origin of Species is "Or the preservation of favoured races in
the struggle for life" but Darwin was using the word "race" in a very
different sense from ours. It is totaly clear, if you read past the
title to the book itself, that a "favoured race" meant something like
'that set of individuals who possess a certain favoured genetic mutation"
(although Darwin would not have used that language because he did not
have our modern concept of a genetic mutation).
6. There is no mention of Darwin in Mein Kampf. Not one
single, solitary mention, not one mention in any of the 27 chapters
of this long and tedious book. Don't you think that, if Hitler was truly
influenced by Darwin, he would have given him at least one teeny weeny
mention in his book? Was he, perhaps, INDIRECTLY influenced by some
of Darwin's ideas, without knowing it? Only if you completely misunderstand
Darwin's ideas, as some have definitely done: the so-called Social Darwinists
such as Herbert Spencer and John D Rockefeller. Hitler could fairly
be described as a Social Darwinist, but all modern evolutionists, almost
literally without exception, have been vocal in their condemnation of
Social Darwinism. This of course includes Michael Shermer and me and
PZ Myers and all the other evolutionary scientists whom Ben Stein and
his team tricked into taking part in his film by lying to us about their
true intentions.
7. Hitler did attempt eugenic breeding of humans, and this is sometimes
misrepresented as an attempt to apply Darwinian principles to humans.
But this interpretation gets it historically backwards, as PZ Myers
has pointed out. Darwin's great achievement was to look at the familiar
practice of domestic livestock breeding by artificial selection, and
realise that the same principle might apply in NATURE, thereby explaining
the evolution of the whole of life: "natural selection", the "survival
of the fittest". Hitler didn't apply NATURAL selection to humans. He
was probably even more ignorant of natural selection than Ben Stein
evidiently is. Hitler tried to apply ARTIFICIAL selection to humans,
and there is nothing specifically Darwinian about artificial selection.
It has been familiar to farmers, gardeners, horse trainers, dog breeders,
pigeon fanciers and many others for centuries, even millennia. Everybody
knew about artificial selection, and Hitler was no exception. What was
unique about Darwin was his idea of NATURAL selection; and Hitler's
eugenic policies had nothing to do with natural selection.
8. Mr J, you have been cruelly duped by Ben Stein and his unscrupulous
colleagues. It is a wicked, evil thing they have done to you, and potentially
to many others. I do not know whether they knowingly and wantonly perpetrated
the falsehood that fooled you. Perhaps they genuinely and sincerely
believed it, although other actions by them, which you can read about
all over the Internet, persuade me that
they are fully capable of deliberate and calculated deception.
You are perhaps not to be blamed for swallowing the film's
falsehoods, because you probably assumed that nobody would have the
gall to make a whole film like that without checking their facts first.
Perhaps even you will need a little more convincing that they were wrong,
in which case I urge you to read it up and study the matter in detail
-- something that Ben Stein and his crew manifestly and lamentably failed
to do.
Daniel Dickson-LaPrade says:
one BIG difference is that Lysenkoism was very top-down.
Darwinist biologists were imprisoned, exiled, killed, or pressured to
emigrate so that the glorious forward march of Soviet agriculture could
continue untrammeled by the crypto-capitalism of Darwinist stooges (LOL).
Luckily, the ID movement and other astroturf evolution denialist movements
have had no luck whatsoever gaining any respect either within the scientific
community or (for the most part) in the highest levels of government.
Jeff Williams says:
Agree that there were obvious political differences as DDL points
out.
But its clear was thread runs through both movements...the rejection
of a system of thought known as the scientific method to obtain political
or social ends, primarily because the "offending" system ran counter
to achieving those political ends.
Different ends...same means. Reject fact, reject the scientific process
and twist the "facts" and the "system" to fit within a failed political/social
agenda.
I’d never heard of the series The Ascent of Man before,
but this clip captures perfectly why the current administration’s claim
to absolute certainty is to be feared.
Amazon.com INTELLIGENT DESIGN Hypothesis+Prediction+Mechanism+Experiment
= SCIENCE - science Discussion Forum
A relevant critique of the concept of "detecting
design": http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Positive_Case_for_Design
The concept of "irreducible complexity" is likewise
deeply flawed.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/behe.html
|
Looks like there is a rich bolshevism tradition in certain parts of
the USA media ;-)
Mark, you hit the nail on the head. You see anti-intellectualism
spewing from the mouths of cable pundits, ironically
many Harvard-educated, who hold out the "average-joe"
- the uneducated, blue
collar worker, as the heart and soul of America,
a noble savage that can spot an "elitist" a mile
away, especially in the presidential race.
According to these pundits, the people do not want
too smart a president; rather, they want a president
with whom they can envision downing a cold beer.
So, If I understand it, these average joes want
their own kids to go to the best college possible
but they want their president to be an average-IQ
good ol' boy.
From the redoubtable Dr. Dawkins in The God Delusion:
Mensa meta analysis indicates religiosity is inversely
correlated with education, interest in science,
and IQ. Guess we should not be surprised. Sorry,
I strayed a bit off topic, but then again these
noble savages are the ones who think dinosaurs perished
a few days ago.
|
Greg Janzen -- "Religion, as usual, is the source
of the problem."
I'm not trying to exonerate religion, but my point
is that it's a bit deeper than that. Religion is
the vehicle (or excuse, or label), but anti-intellectualism
was also rampant in Pol Pot's Cambodia and Mao's
China, to well-known effect. The first thing Pol
Pot did was shoot the intellectuals, going so far
as to simply kill everyone wearing glasses.
Where religion already has a foothold (and is already
leaning towards to anti-intellectualism) then that's
the form it takes, but God is not the entirety of
the problem. I know many evangelicals who, if they
abandoned their faith tomorrow, would just flip
over to belonging to the atheist "club," with t-shirts,
bumper stickers, and thoe whole "part of something"
thing they like but which is so inimical to critical
thinking.
3 of 4 people think this post adds to the discussion.
Interesting. But it's been argued (by serious historians
and not just by popular commentators like Hitchens),
and I tend to agree,
that regimes like Pol Pot's, Mao's, Stalin's,
etc. were effectively religious regimes.
E.g., all of them encouraged submission to an all-powerful
dictator, a quintessentially religious practice.
So one wonders if it isn't a confluence of religious
elements that ultimately led to the anti-intellectualism
of those regimes.
But your claim regarding the evangelicals seems
true. I, too, know evangelicals who would take up
crystal gazing, astrology, or some other bunkum
if they lost their faith in god. I don't know if
this is a symptom of the whole "part of something"
thing, but it's a complete abandonment of the intellect.
They seem positively intent on avoiding anything
that might require them to use their noggins
|
Greg,
Did you see this article about a recent poll taken
in the UK?
A CHARITY set up by an ardent Christian to fight
slavery and the opium trade has identified a new
social evil of the 21st century - religion.
A poll by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation uncovered
a widespread belief that faith - not just in its
extreme form - was intolerant, irrational and used
to justify persecution. Pollsters asked 3,500 people
in Britain what they considered to be the worst
blights on modern society, updating a list drawn
up by Rowntree, a Quaker, 104 years ago.
The responses may well have dismayed him. The researchers
found that the "dominant opinion" was that religion
was a "social evil".
Many participants said religion divided society,
fuelled intolerance and spawned "irrational" educational
and other policies.
One said: "Faith in supernatural phenomena inspires
hatred and prejudice throughout the world, and is
commonly used as justification for persecution of
women, gays and people who do not have faith."
Many respondents called for state funding of church
schools to be ended.
The findings contrast with Rowntree's "scourges
of humanity", which included poverty, war, slavery,
intemperance, the opium trade, impurity and gambling.
Poverty and drugs remained on the list, but are
joined by issues such as family breakdown, young
people's behaviour and fears over immigration.
Tom Butler, the Bishop of Southwark, rejected the
poll's indictment of faith. He said: "People meeting
together, week after week, for worship, support
and education in church, synagogue, temple, gurdwara
and mosque can not only help people build local
community but can teach children to become good
citizens."
However, Terry Sanderson, president of the National
Secular Society, said he was "extremely pleased".
"Britain has had it with religion," he said.
|
TD -- so what? dinos & people co-existed & cuz eve
ate an apple - plant eating kitty cats (and other
carnivores) started eating (*gasp*) other animals.
every culture has their weird beliefs -- why should
we be immune? let people believe whatever nonsense
they like -- it might make them happier. but here
is where i get controversial...I
think, before people *vote* they have to demonstrate
*competency* on several levels. qualifying exams
on key issues, that's all i ask.
|
TD & Elliot,
I first read about the report in U.K Times Online
(when I found the link again it would not open)
Evidently, the published news article was somewhat
controversial in that the hard data wasn't included.
I found the actual Rowntree Foundation report in
pdf form - http://www.socialevils.org.uk/documents/social-evils-report.pdf
Evidently, they didn't publish the actual number
of respondents who felt religion was a "social evil"
either. (Knowing that percentage seems to be at
the center of the dispute between secularists and
theists)
What the report said - "There was disagreement among
participants around the issue of religion. Some
identified the decline of religion in society as
a social evil.
A more dominant opinion, however, stood in stark
contrast to this: some people identified religion
itself as a social evil. This group generally focused
on one of three issues: the "erosion of secularism";
religion as cause of intolerance and conflict; and
religion as a source of irrationality."
So we're left to ask what number out of 3500 constitutes
the "dominant opinion" and, of course, in the highly
religious USA, the results would be significantly
different.
Best Regards
Steve
|
After the accounting scandals of 2002, where Skilling and other Harvard
MBAs played high-profile roles, the school studied what it could do
to improve the conduct of its graduates. It concluded that students'
ethical compasses were set before they got there, which one could view
either as accurate or a way of punting.
Comments
- Richard Kline said...
- While this is cross-grain to the purpose
of your post, Yves, I just can't put out of my mind the question
of who Dubya Bush _paid_ to do his course work for that diploma.
I cannot, CANNOT, believe that a man as fundamentally stupid, unlearned,
and incapbable of extracting any real content even from the few
books he mentions in passing that he currently has read could have
mustered a passing grade at a competitive graduate program, let
alone one heavy on the math side like an MBA. Who'd he pay, 'cause
it's a no-brainer he couldn't cut this course?
- First, a lot of people who graduate from
HBS aren't the brightest bulbs. Only a fairly low percentage (under
10%) is either flunked out or drops the program. And you get a long
way in that program by stating the obvious, with conviction.
Second, in the runup to the 2004 election, someone sent me a video
of Bush giving a speech and taking questions when he was campaigning
for Texas governor. The difference was stunning. He could handle
multisyllabic words and complex sentence structures with confidence,
and could field questions with answers that appeared nuanced. So
the intervening years of hard drinking killed more brain cells than
most of us realize.
... ... ...
- Yeah, well, I do know that few graduate
programs wash out their aceptees, especially at the masters' level:
it reflects poorly on the _program_. And these MBS barns are tremendous
cash cows for their institutions, so I guess.
And I agree with the very first observation regarding the impact
on attendees ethics by these programs, that the ethical perspective
of those individuals is largely set before they ever arrive. Whether
or not these programs should teach ethics, they will have little
impact on the actual morals or lack thereof of those whom they instruct.
And Dubya, hard-drinkin' _since_ he got elected in Texas? I mean,
I really don't keep up on his personal timeline, but doesn't this
go back on, y'know, his pact with God?? . . . Could it be blow,
maybe??? The man sure does _not_ seem to function congnitively.
- I have found Harvard MBAs to be unambiguously
afflicted with excessive hubris, compulsive salesmanship, mediocre
intellect, and unimpressive analytical skills - in other words,
quite well positioned to assume leadership roles in business.
- One of the problems with business school
in general is that it teaches that management's role is to serve
shareholder interests and that shareholder interests are best served
by maximizing profit.
According to
Wikipedia "Shleifer's involvement in Russia was investigated by David
McClintick, a Harvard alumnus and journalist for
Institutional Investor Magazine. His 30-page January 2006 article claims
to show that "economics professor Andrei Shleifer, in the mid-1990s, led
a Harvard advisory program in Russia that collapsed in disgrace."
March 25, 2006 |
The Boston Globe
WHEN LAWRENCE Summers resigned the Harvard University
presidency last month, his action was attributed in large part to difficulty
in human relations. Whatever the true reason, when Summers's legacy
is examined, he should be held to account for his role in a scandal
with which he was intimately involved, both as a Treasury official and
at Harvard. Yet the strange saga of Harvard's involvement in US aid
to Russia in the 1990s is more than a scandal about Summers and Harvard.
The case illustrates the overall failure of the US accountability system.
Ten years ago my article about the role of the US-funded Harvard
advisers in Russia's economic reforms exposed their maze of networks.
I analyzed the web of interconnections that enabled Harvard economist
Andrei Shleifer, a friend of then Treasury official Lawrence Summers,
and a close-knit group of Russians and Americans to largely shape US
economic aid policy and Russian economic ''reforms" while managing virtually
the entire nearly $400 million US flagship economic aid project.
Summers helped Shleifer and Harvard gain
noncompetitive government awards through arrangements that were highly
unusual in foreign aid contracting at the time, according to US officials.
This maze of networks guaranteed the Harvard players their success
in the 1990s. It also enfeebled the multiple investigations of their
activities during the same period. Although the US Justice Department
filed suit in 2000 (following a three-year investigation), alleging
that Shleifer and Harvard had conspired to defraud the US government,
the case came to a head only last summer with a negotiated settlement
that required the university to pay $26.5 million in fines and Shleifer
to pay $2 million. And despite being versed in Summers's entanglements,
in 2001, the Harvard Corporation, with sole authority to hire and fire
the Harvard president, appointed him the university's president.
The Harvard case points to the failure of modern democracy to adapt
its monitoring and accountability systems to
a new breed of players exemplified by Shleifer. These
peripatetic players have gained influence in the reorganizing, networked
world in which authority has been diffused by the profusion of government
outsourcing contracts and the end of the Cold War.
The result is that accountability has been undercut by relationships
between governments and contractors that are too tenuous, flexible,
and ambiguous to be genuinely monitored. Shleifer, for example, played
sometimes indistinct and overlapping roles as he lobbied in favor of
his projects and advised both the United States and Russia while making
investments for his own personal gain, all the while presenting himself
as independent analyst and author. The endowment funds of both Harvard
and Yale gained access to valuable investments through networks inhabited
by Shleifer and/or his currency-trading wife. His investments in Russia,
which he does not deny, included securities, equities, oil and aluminum
companies, real estate, and mutual funds -- many of the same areas in
which he was being paid to provide impartial advice.
Shleifer's defense in the Justice Department's
lawsuit is revealing: Although US prosecutors charged that his investments
violated federal conflict-of-interest regulations, defense lawyers maintained
that he was a ''mere consultant," and thus not subject to these rules.
Yet as director of the project, the buck stopped with him.
The system is virtually incapable of dealing with such players' infractions
and lack of transparency in a timely fashion. It is not for lack of
inquiries, including a 1996 Government Accountability Office investigation
and a lawsuit brought by a US mutual funds firm working in Russia, which
was settled out of court in 2002.
Traditional accountability frameworks are no match for the ways in
which today's diffused authority provides new opportunities for players
to brandish influence, evade culpability, and gain deniability, while
writing the new rules of the game. While
Shleifer must pay a settlement and legal fees, it is too late for the
Russian people, who, instead of wise guidance, got corruption and a
system wide open to looting. Until the United States
devises better ways to track the networks and activities of these new
players, it is destined to have an ever more untransparent and unaccountable
system, with grave implications for democracy.
Janine R. Wedel, professor of public policy
at George Mason University, is author of ''Collision and Collusion:
The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe."
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.
-
Hardcover: 384 pages
-
Publisher: Pantheon (February 12, 2008)
-
Language: English
-
ISBN-10: 0375423745
Too Long, Thinly Documented and Lacking Recommendations,
February 15, 2008
|
By |
Loyd E. Eskildson "Pragmatist"
(Phoenix, AZ.) |
"The Age of American Unreason" aims to update us (post
Richard Hofstadter's 1963 "Anti-Intellectualism in American
Life") on how American culture devalues knowledge and rationalism.
Supporting material include findings that only about half
of Americans read a book in any year, only 26% accept Darwin's
theory of evolution, and only a minority can name the four
gospels or the first book of the Bible. Jacoby also contends
that anti-intellectualism and knowledge is worse in the
U.S. than any other developed economy - but offers no evidence.
How did we get to this state? McCarthyism, liberal Soviet
defenders, the growth of religious fundamentalism and junk-science,
and a celebrity-focused culture are proffered candidates
for blame. Again, however, little is offered as evidence
except in the case of junk science - fomented by right-wing
backers. Regardless, Jacoby also fails to peel back the
onion further - eg. "Why has fundamentalism grown?" Jacoby
does make an important point stating that the impact of
anti-intellectualism is much greater today than the 1800's
when science and medicine had much less to offer.
Other candidates should also be considered for blame - the
growth of particularly strong anti-intellectualism among
inner-city African-American youth, endless self-promoting
junk science "research" from other sources (eg. drug companies,
various "diet gurus," many social 'scientists'), elevation
of race- and gender-based courses to major fields of study,
the growth of "political correctness" and cultural relativism,
truth-twisting by politicians, misleading and overly simplistic
books and articles (eg. concluding causation via correlation),
weak academic standards, and media's minimal efforts at
investigative journalism.
Jacoby also fails to note that the average citizen's aversion
to knowledge and rationalism can at least be partially explained.
After all, who wants more work after their eight+ hours
on the job and fighting traffic, preparing and eating breakfast
and dinner, PLUS taking care of the children and other family
matters? Further, separating junk science from the real
thing requires considerable subject matter (often deliberately
withheld) and statistical background. As for politics, even
some knowledgeable people I know see involvement as a waste
of time - "nothing changes," "they all lie," and "only big
donors have input," while leaders since Harry Truman have
bemoaned economists' inability to come to useful conclusions.
On the other hand, it is troubling to see how readily misinformed
Americans acquiesce to acceptance of non-thinking ideology
and major misdirections in American governance.
Anti-Intellectualism Revisited, March
8, 2008
More damaging and pervasive than fundamentalist religion is our culture
of "infotainment," available everywhere and all the time, promoting
junk science, celebrity culture, youth culture, and mindless music and
video segments. Jacoby argues that what
is lost in this type of media bombardment, which requires only the shortest
of attention spans, is the ability to think at all. She
longs for the print culture of earlier times, when people still had
the leisure and the quiet to read the classics.
Those times, however, are gone. Technology is driving today's culture
and intellectuals are adopting to the changes. The distinction between
old and new media is already obselete. Newspapers
and books now appear in digital form giving people have a superabundance
of information to sift through. The question is do we stll have the
stamina and discipline to discern what in our culture is worth keeping?
February 20, 2008 |
charles
hugh smith-
Is the U.S. a deeply anti-intellectual, anti-learning culture, and
thus a deeply ignorant one? Every few years comes a book which argues
persuasively, "yes." This year's entry is
The Age of American Unreason
. Longtime correspondent U. Doran alerted me to the book via this story
link:
Susan Jacoby: Bemoaning an America that values stupidity.
A generation ago the book du jour chastising the dumbing down of
America was
The Closing of the American Mind
which judging by sales on amazon.com remains very much in the public
consciousness.
The Anatomy of Science
The Anatomy of Pseudoscience and Irrationalism
The Great Plagiarism Witch Hunt
New York Times
...T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly
review Raritan, said, “The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial
in American history,” adding that in periods “when political problems
seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward cultural
issues.”
But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism
(the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and
anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence
or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.
Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic
and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.
She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly
half of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important
to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three
years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college
could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.
Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match,
was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the
New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth
Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library
when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.
Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed
and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she
quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she
thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the
Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.
The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started
the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
Ms. Jacoby doesn’t expect to revolutionize the nation’s educational
system or cause millions of Americans to switch off “American Idol”
and pick up Schopenhauer. But she would like to start a conversation
about why the United States seems particularly
vulnerable to such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism.
After all, “the empire of infotainment doesn’t stop at the American
border,” she said, yet students in many other countries consistently
outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative
tes
