There are people who think the world in recent times has been suffering under something called "neoliberalism" in which "social spending"is savaged ....
[Hat tips Zeitgeist Explorer and A. Comte]
Yeah, I know, talking about tariffs, tariff threats and tariff retaliation can get tedious.
But the threats are real. And the US president doesn't care about the destruction of world trade (google "Smoot Hawley Great Depression" if you want a clue) — and the MAGAts don't care about anything much beyond "owning the libs" and all the 4d chess their hero is allegedly playing.
Except it's neither chess nor 4d. MAGAts are now touting the "concrete behavioural changes" the tariff threats allegedly caused in Canada and Mexico. Except, as Phil Magness patiently explains, much of what was "achieved" was either already in motion or could easily have been accomplished through less aggressive means.
Prediction: most of the Tariff Fundamentalists who are touting tariffs as a "negotiating tactic" today will resume their calls for tariffs as an economic protection strategy a few days from now. A few days later they will call it a revenue source. Then a negotiating tactic again.
As another commenter observed, for MAGAts it's Schrodinger's tariff threats all the way down.
Oh, by the way. Whoever disagrees with Trump and the MAGAts on any of this is "an anti-American conspirator" and also "controlled by China."
If words like "imbecile" and "unhinged" occur to you about now, you're not alone.
* * * *
* NB: Note that the border security is ostensibly to arrest to the terrible threat of fentanyl pouring across the Canadian border. Yet:
The amount of fentanyl that comes across the border from Canada is negligible. In 2024, DEA stats that just 43lbs were intercepted at the entire northern border, which is just 0.2% of total fentanyl seizures entering the US in that period.
So even if you think fentanyl is a problem justifying some sort of policy response, it's a complete waste of resources to focus them on the US-Canada border. It's also likely that the increased border enforcement there will create other bureaucratic hassles and inconveniences for routine border crossings, as most police-heavy drug enforcement efforts do.
Like almost everything with Trump, he just makes stuff up. Except "instead of the Big Lie, it is the Little Lie. Thousands upon thousands of them. They keep everyone off kilter trying to rebut them."
"I've wanted to write for a while about [so-called] 'induced demand,' the specious argument that expanded roads just fill up with new traffic so why should we bother [building more]?
"Two articles below debunk the induced demand argument in their own ways, but here's my own TL;DR summary: Which type of infrastructure should government invest in: transit almost nobody will use, or lanes everybody will use? Induced demand is a false argument. Nobody says 'don't build a new airport terminal or runway - it will just fill up with new flights' or 'don’t build a new port terminal – it will just fill up with ships'."~ Tory Gattis from his post 'Induced Demand Debunked' [emphasis in the original]
"The co-president of the St. Johns Rotary Club is promising an investigation into how a cut-out cardboard mask of former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern ended up taped to a toilet seat.
"The investigation is happening basically because our media demanded it. Why this co-president didn’t respond to enquiring journalists with a sharp ‘FUCK OFF’ ... will long remain a mystery to me. Harassment from intolerable puritans surely warrants nothing less? ...
"In a free and open democracy politicians people feel are subpar end up on toilet seats and the like ... When a politician is considered saintly, to the point their image can’t be tarnished by satire or even the lowest forms of comedy, this says people are caught up in a brand and not the leader’s substance....
"[P]oliticians need criticism – ferocious criticism – and to be ridiculed, otherwise they have no reason to do the right thing.
"Why a responsible media would seek protect the powerful from low-level offence is beyond me.... There’s not a politician, living or dead, whose face doesn’t belong on a toilet seat."~ Dane Giraud, from his post 'Every politician’s face belongs on a toilet seat'
"Former TV One Newsreader Liz Gunn has informed the nation that the recent earthquake centred on Taumarunui was nature’s reaction to the 'tyrannical Prime Minister’s vaccine policy,' which Liz equated with rape.
"That sounds reasonable."~ Bob Jones, on 'Refreshing Visionary Thinking'
We are not suddenly becoming more intelligent and getting everything right, says Patrick Michaels in this guest post. What’s happening is that scientists are responding to incentives.
Incentives matter.
For years, scientists and non-scientists alike have complained that something is fundamentally wrong with the way we do this business. Something has corrupted the integrity of our science.
This is a serious charge because it means that more and more government policy — from limiting carcinogens to regulations on carbon emissions — is based upon an increasingly polluted canon of knowledge. If that were somehow corrected for, we would live under a far less intrusive government.
Last week, this view received strong support when two researchers, Paul Smaldino and Richard McElreath, published a bombshell article in a journal of Britain’s Royal Society called “The Natural Selection of Bad Science.” Put simply, it is a closely argued, mathematically rigorous demonstration that the way we now reward scientists is actually making science worse.
The things that scientists crave — like tenure and research funding — incentivise frequent publishing of massive numbers of academic papers. To publish that much, you need a tremendous amount of financial support. And when it comes to scientific work that could have regulatory implications, almost all of the money comes from government.
As Smaldino and McElreath explain in their study, this rush for the printing presses leads to sloppy science and declining standards of rigour. So, by extension, the more money the government throws at some field with an initially limited number of practitioners (think global warming) the worse the science will become.
What constitutes “bad science”? It’s the epidemic of positive results, in which a researcher reports that the data support his or her prior hypothesis. Stanford’s Daniele Fanelli has shown a distressing increase of positive results in recent decades, something that can’t be true in the real world. Think about it — we are not suddenly becoming more intelligent and getting everything right. What’s happening is that scientists are responding to incentives.
Usually, hypotheses are put forward in some grant proposal. Financial backers don’t like negative findings, because negative findings don’t support the work that they’ve funded. Supervisors lose face and researchers can lose their funding.
There’s an additional wrinkle on this that neither the authors nor anyone else has discussed. What happens when the government massively funds something that really isn’t science?
By “science” I mean “hypotheses that can be subjected to stringent tests.” Science that can’t be tested is really just “pseudoscience.” These days however philosophies claiming the scientific mantle are being used to explain pretty much everything.
Back in Karl Popper’s day, his favourite pseudosciences were psychoanalysis and Marxism. If he were alive today he would see parallels when prominent climatologists explain pretty much every and any weather anomaly — a big rainstorm, a big drought, lack of snow, or a big blizzard — as “consistent with” the effects of global warming. It’s a good bet that climate science, which is primarily the generation of unverifiable prospective models (after all, the future isn’t here yet) would have made Popper’s list.
So, instead of being rewarded for research that supports a prior hypothesis, no matter how sloppy it is, those involved in climate studies get published a lot not by testing (which can’t be done in the prospective sense) but by producing dire, horrific results. Because these often appear in prominent journals — which love to feature articles that generate big news stories — the greater the horror, the more likely is promotion, citation and more money.
In a vicious cycle, this then generates more and more of these perverse incentives.
All of this is well and good and could be dismissed as just another example of how incentives drive supposedly dispassionate scientists. But in several fields, like climate, the accumulation of horrific literature is often summarised by governments, usually to support some policy. Bad science then justifies bad policy.
It is quite significant that Smaldino and McElreath’s paper was published by the Royal Society. Surely they know the result will be more distrust of the modern scientific enterprise, and, by extension, in the policies supported by it. The fact of its publication is evidence that we have reached a turning point, where the pollution of modern science is now an accepted truth.
.
.
UPDATE: Down this path Lysenko lies:
Climate science 7. Gordon Tullock on induced curiosity and the decline of scientific integrity
Gordon Tullock in The Organization of Inquiry (1966) sketched a scenario for the decline of a scientific discipline, given a particular combination of motivational factors and institutional incentives.
As a student of legal, social and economic systems he identified three kinds of curiosity
1. Pure curiosity and compulsion to find how the world works.
2. The passionate desire to solve practical problems.
3. “Induced curiosity” directed to either pure or applied problems.
Who are the researchers with induced curiosity? Those who do not have a consuming passion for research but do it because it is a job. The most obvious examples are academic staff who have to “publish or perish” to obtain tenure and promotion, and the scientists who work “nine to five” in public and private research laboratories. Of course outstanding work can be produced by academics seeking promotion and even by nine to five scientists but Tullock’s analysis addressed some tendencies which could emerge in a system where more and more of the workers have “induced” curiosity and less and less (in proportion) harbour a burning commitment to the quest…
He suggested that a self-perpetuating process could occur in a journal or a field of research dominated by investigators with induced curiosity (or “normal” or “uncritical scientists”) so the work could “gradually slip away from reality in the direction of superficially impressive but actually easy research projects”…
Towards the end of that slippery slope is the situation where there is a widespread belief in the field that the function of the researcher is to take a side on some issue. Simply presenting a rationalisation for some position chosen on other grounds may be acceptable as an objective of research, and the principal criterion in judging journals may become their points of view.
“The concern with reality that unites the sciences, then, may be absent in this area, and the whole thing may be reduced to a pseudo-science like genetics in Lysenko’s Russia…”.
A clerisy of Intellectuals Yet Idiots (IYIs) has ben quietly hoovering up power around the west, a minority inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders whose power-nannying is as odious as it is repellent.
Nassim Taleb exposes the species in this guest post.
What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.
But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They can’t tell science from scientism — in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types — those who want to “nudge” us into some behaviour — much of what they would classify as “rational” or “irrational” (or some such categories indicating deviation from a desired or prescribed protocol) comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter [in my book Skin in the Game] extending the minority rule.
The Intellectual Yet Idiot is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local supremum today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in most countries, the government’s role is between five and ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP). The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and is rarely seen outside specialised outlets, think tanks, the media, and universities — most people have proper jobs and there are not many openings for the IYI.
Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry.
The IYI pathologises others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realising it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “rednecks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”. What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences. While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one-vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools and PhDs as these are needed in the club.
More socially, the IYI subscribes to the likes of The New Yorker. He never curses on twitter [and professes to despise hose who do – Ed.]. He speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality” but never went out drinking even with a minority cab driver (again, no real skin in the game as the concept is foreign to the IYI). Those in the U.K. have been taken for a ride by Tony Blair. The modern IYI has attended more than one TEDx talks in person or watched more than two TED talks on Youtube. Not only will he vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seems electable and some such circular reasoning, but holds that anyone who doesn’t do so is mentally ill.
The IYI has a copy of the first hardback edition of The Black Swan on his shelves, but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence. He believes that GMOs are “science,” that the “technology” is not different from conventional breeding as a result of his readiness to confuse science with scientism.
Typically, the IYI get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains. In the comfort of his suburban home with 2-car garage, he advocated the “removal” of Gadhafi because he was “a dictator,” not realising that removals have consequences (recall that he has no skin in the game and doesn’t pay for results).
The IYI has been wrong, historically, on Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviourism, transfats, Freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modelling, housing projects, selfish gene, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup) and p-values. But he is convinced that his current position is right.
The IYI is member of a club to get travelling privileges; if social scientist he uses statistics without knowing how they are derived (like Steven Pinker and psycholophasters in general); when in the UK, he goes to literary festivals; he drinks red wine with steak (never white); he used to believe that fat was harmful and has now completely reversed; he takes statins because his doctor told him to do so; he fails to understand ergodicity and when explained to him, he forgets about it soon later; he doesn’t use Yiddish words even when talking business; he studies grammar before speaking a language; he has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; he has never read Frederic Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshot, John Gray, Amianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadiah Gaon, or Joseph De Maistre; he has never gotten drunk with Russians; he never drank to the point when one starts breaking glasses (or, preferably, chairs); he doesn’t even know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba (which in Brooklynese is “can’t tell shit from shinola”); he doesn’t know that there is no difference between “pseudointellectual” and “intellectual” in the absence of skin in the game; has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics.
He knows at any point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation.
But a much easier marker: he doesn’t even deadlift.
Not an IYI
From the reactions to this piece, I discovered that the IYI has difficulty, when reading, in differentiating between the satirical and the literal.
The IYI thinks this criticism of IYIs means “everybody is an idiot”, not realising that their group represents, as we said, a tiny minority — but they don’t like their sense of entitlement to be challenged and although they treat the rest of humans as inferiors, they don’t like it when the waterhose is turned to the opposite direction (what the French call arroseur arrosé). (For instance, Richard Thaler, partner of the dangerous GMO advocate Übernudger Cass Sunstein, interpreted this piece as saying that “there are not many non-idiots not called Taleb,” not realising that people like him are < 1% or even .1% of the population.)
.
Try navigating to Mars using the literal ‘word of God’ as your road map…
[Hat tip The Cult of Eh™]
.
The fetid end of the political spectrum is rising up to support statism in the name of protecting IQ – on the basis, say the fetid-swamp warriors, that the “low IQs” will only destroy the culture and are too dumb to deserve freedom anyway.
Vile enough, but does their chosen proxy even merit serious consideration? No, says Jeffrey Tucker in this guest post.
The cultural fascination with the idea of an “intelligence quotient” or IQ seems to be experiencing a resurgence. Relentless testing is a feature of schooling and school admissions, and tests are used for a variety of occupational screenings. The practice reflects an intuition we all have: some bulbs are brighter than others. Surely there is nothing wrong with knowing, measuring, and acting on that information, however difficult it might be to assess?
Where matters become elusive is in codifying those skills, reducing them all to a single quantitative number, aggregating them based on other demographic traits, assessing the variability of the results, comparing the results across large population groups, determining the variety of causal factors – genetic, environmental, sheer personal determination – that make up what we call intelligence, and cobbling together a plan for what to do with the results.
Here we have a much more complex problem, as complex as the human mind itself. The amateur commentator might read a book on the topic and hope to come away with a sense that within this literature we find the key to the rise and fall of whole civilisations. The would-be central planner salivates at the prospect! But the more you read, the less certain you become, and the more in awe of the unknowns, the surprises, and the way the real world continues to defy the predictions of the “scientific” central-planning elite.
The IQ as a Central Planning Tool
And then there are the social and political implications of the efforts. What’s not usually understood is that the search for some measurable standard of intelligence – and implicitly human value itself – has a deep history that is bound up with the emergence of the planned society, eugenics, and the 20th century leviathan state.
That’s hardly surprising. The notion of a scientific elite classifying people based on aptitude, assigning an efficient role for everyone, appeals to the conceit of intellectuals. While the curiosity about human biodiversity seems innocent, the birth of an ideology rooted in quantitative measurement of mental aptitude, backed by a scientistic planning ambition, obviously trends anti-liberal.
The story of IQ begins at the end of the Franco-Prussian war when France’s civic institutions were remodelled to never lose another war. The prevailing theory was that France lacked the technical skills necessary for modern warfare. Citizens needed training which meant education reform. Schooling would raise up a citizen army and therefore must be forced. From 1879 to 1886, legislation imposed compulsory schooling on the entire population.
With all kids now forced into non-religious schools, it was time to impose a rational method on steering the conscripts into socially and politically optimal paths. In 1904, just as fascination with the idea of scientific socialism was gaining fashion, the French Ministry of Education contacted the psychologist Alfred Binet (1857-1911) to come up with some assessment test. He came up with a series of questions from easiest to hardest, and ranked the kids based on their performance of the tests.
The result was the Binet-Simon scale. From Binet’s point of view, the only purpose was to identify which kids needed special focus and attention so that they would not be left behind. But the idea of quantity, ranking, and assessing cognitive performance caught on in the United States, where eugenics had become a prevailing intellectual fashion, driving public policy in labour regulations, immigration, forced sterilisations, marriage licenses, welfare policy, business regulation, and segregation strategies.
The first American enthusiast for Binet’s work was Henry H. Goddard, a leading champion of eugenics and a champion of the planning state. In 1908, Goddard translated Binet’s work and popularised it among the intellectual classes. He turned what might have been a humanitarian push to provide remedial help to students into a weapon of war against the weak.
What did Goddard believe could be done with his insights?
He summarised his political outlook as follows:
Democracy, then, means that the people rule by selecting the wisest, most intelligent, and most human to tell them what to do to be happy. Thus Democracy is a method for arriving at a truly benevolent aristocracy. Such a consummation will be reached when the most intelligent learn to apply their intelligence…. High intelligence must so work for the welfare of the masses as to command their respect and affection.
Goddard’s views were those of his generation, as they were the theorists of the totalitarian state.
What’s more,
society must be so organised that these people of limited intelligence shall not be given, or allowed to hold, positions that require more intelligence than they possess. And in the positions that they can fill, they must be treated in accordance with their level of intelligence. A society organised on this basis would be a perfect society.
Toward this end, he broke down the human population into normative categories, the underperforming of whom he labelled imbeciles, morons, and idiots – designations that survive to this day. He proposed a new form of social order in which an elite of intellectuals assigns tasks and life stations based on test results.
Illiberal at its Core
Yes, it sounds just like Hunger Games, Divergent, or any number of other dystopian nightmares because that is exactly what he imagined could be achieved with IQ studies. Having now read many dozens of books, articles, and contemporary accounts of this whole generation of thinkers, none of this comes as a surprise. Goddard’s views were those of his generation, and they were the theorists of the totalitarian state – the “Progressives” in the United States, the post-Bismarckian planners of imperial Germany, the scientific socialists of Russia, and, later, the ghoulish exterminationists of Nazi Germany. It’s all of a piece. Only their results differ.
Continuing the tradition was Lewis Terman of Stanford who in 1916 proposed a revision to the now-traditional Binet test, and became an open and aggressive advocate of segregation, sterilization, immigration controls, birthing licenses, and a planned society generally.
White supremacy was a given among this generation, [as it is among today’s so-called Alt-Right – Ed.] and Terman embraced it openly: “There is no possibility at present of convincing society that [Mexicans, Indians, and Negros] should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.” In that spirit, he joined the Human Betterment Foundation, which played the crucial role in California’s sterilisation program that had such a profound influence on the later race policies of Hitler’s Germany.
Intelligence tests became essential for a nation at war, with eugenicists advising the US Army about the fitness of soldiers: the dumbest at the front and the smartest in safe positions of leadership. And they advised immigration authorities: who could become an American and who couldn’t. Eugenics was the goal for which intelligence testing became a crucial part of the scientific veneer.
Thomas Leonard summarises the bloody history:
Dubious though the tests and testing methods were, the millions of persons subjected to crude intelligence tests demonstrated one result unambiguously. American social scientists had convinced government authorities to fund and compel human subjects for an unprecedented measurement enterprise, carried out to identify and cull inferiors, all in the name of improving the efficiency of the nation’s public schools, immigration entry stations, institutions for the handicapped, and military.
That only begins to scratch the surface of the far-reaching hopes of the IQ-eugenics movement. So close is the relationship between the theory and policy ambition that they are really inseparable.
There seems to be nothing particularly threatening about wanting to assess an individual’s aptitude. And yet IQ testing was created and used as a social planning tool for use in compulsory education and war preparation, and mutated into a full-scale ideology that had no regard for human rights, the liberal theory of the social order, or freedom more generally. The eugenics movement, and its new tool of intelligence testing, hoped to replace freedom and dignity with totalitarian technocracy.
What is it about this ideology that contradicts the idea of a free society? Where is it that IQ ideology goes wrong?
There are three general issues:
First, consumers have odd tastes that have little to do with intelligence, scientifically defined. Abstract Intelligence is not necessarily the thing rewarded by the market, and that matters. In a free society, the value of a resource is not objective; value is conferred on services by the choices we make, whatever they may be.
If you hang out at Nascar races, high intelligence is not the first trait that stands out. Same with monster truck rallies. I might be wrong of course. Maybe if I administered tests to all the participants and consumers, I would be stunned at the disportionate intelligence compared to the general population. The same goes for for a Britney Spears concert, an NFL game, or the buyers of grocery-store romance novels. Maybe in these groups, you find higher intelligence than you find at the university chess club. I do seriously doubt it, however.
But the real question is: why does it matter? Does it matter whether Michael Phelps is smart or that he is the best swimmer in history? Swimming is what he valued for. It’s the same way with Beyonce’s singing and dancing or Matt Damon’s acting. Or think of your favorite local restaurant: it actually doesn’t matter whether the cook is smart or dumb.
The unpredictability of consumer markets defy intelligence distributions. Market processes are not about rewarding intelligence; they are about rewarding talent, insight, and service to others.
In fact, this is precisely why so many intellectuals have despised markets through the centuries. To them, it seems wrong that a professor of physics should make less than a pop star, that a number-crunching bureaucrat would live in a small house and a movie star own five mansions, and so on. Here is the source of more than a century of resentment against capitalism.
We all face resource constraints, time above all else. This is why we cooperate through trade with other people, even those with less absolute ability than we personally possess.
How markets value what they value will always remain unpredictable. What’s crucial is that the common man is in charge of the system, and not planners. And that’s the crux of the issue: who should decide what constitutes human value, who is worthy of being treated with dignity, who should be in charge of how labor resources are going to be used in society? Will we embrace freedom or rule by a wise elite?
Second, the law of association makes everyone valuable. A core belief of the IQ ideology is that smart people, as measured by tests, are more valuable to the social order than dumber people. But economics has made a different discovery. It turns out that through the division of labour, or what Ludwig von Mises called the “law of association,” everyone can be valuable to everyone else, regardless of aptitude.
Michael Phelps might have the cognitive capacity to be the greatest nuclear physicist, computer programmer, or chess player in the world – but it is in his personal interest to focus on his comparative advantage, even if he has an absolute advantage over every person in the world.
We all face resource constraints, time above all else. This is why we cooperate through trade with other people, even those with less absolute ability than we personally possess. The result is more valuable than we could ever create on our own. You know this if you hire your lawn to be mowed, your house cleaned, or go to restaurants. Every social order consists of an infinitely complex web of relationships that defy categorisation by crude scientific tests. It is through the division of labour that freedom finds a way for everyone to become valuable to everyone else. [The Pyramid of Ability Principle and the Law of Association between them ensure both that geniuses benefit those who aren’t, and vice versa – that no-one need be nor should be excluded.]
A third criticism of this literature is more profound. It observes that the intelligence necessary for the building of the network that constitutes the culture of a great society does not reside solely in the minds of particular individuals. The highest intelligence of the social order resides in the processes and institutions of society itself. It doesn’t exist in total in any single mind, and it doesn’t emerge consciously from the plans of any group. [This is one of the features of any division-of-labour society: the multiplication of knowledge.]
Hayek explains in The Counterrevolution of Science:
Though our civilisation is the result of a cumulation of individual knowledge, it is not by the explicit or conscious combination of all this knowledge in any individual brain, but by its embodiment in symbols which we use without understanding them, in habits and institutions, tools and concepts, that man in society is constantly able to profit from a body of knowledge neither he nor any other man completely possesses. Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately co-ordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand. They are greater than any individual precisely because they result from the combination of knowledge more extensive than a single mind can master.
And there we see most plainly the difference between the IQ ideology and the theory of the free society. The IQ ideology tempts us to believe in the same fallacies that drove socialism: the conceit that a small elite, if given enough resources and power, can plan society better than the seemingly random associations, creations, and trades of individuals. Freedom, on the other hand, locates the brilliance of the social order not in the minds of a few, but in the process of social evolution itself and all the surprises and delights that entails.
Jeffrey Tucker is Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education and CLO of the startup Liberty.me. Author of five books, and many thousands of articles, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.
This post first appeared at FEE.
.
In our ongoing efforts here at NOT PC to help you avoid looking like an idiot out in public, here are five things you need to know before holding forth on the self-congratulatory Hippy Issue of the Day – “five rudimentary facts about chemistry that you must grasp before you are even remotely qualified to make an informed decision about medicines, vaccines, food, etc.”:
1). Everything is made of chemicals
[Hence :] A “chemical-free lifestyle” is totally impossible…
It’s also worth noting that the length of a chemical’s name does not indicate how toxic it is…2). The dose makes the poison
No chemical is inherently safe or inherently dangerous…essentially all chemicals are safe at a low enough dose, and essentially all chemicals are toxic at a high enough dose. This is a fundamental fact that people in the anti-science movement routinely ignore…3). There is no difference between “natural” and “synthetic” versions of a chemical
[So]…as long as the chemical structure is the same, it doesn’t matter if the chemical was extracted from a plant or synthesised in a lab.4). “Natural” chemicals are not automatically good and “artificial” chemicals are not automatically bad
…this claim is nothing more than an appeal to nature fallacy. Nature is full of chemicals such as cyanide and arsenic that are dangerous at anything but a very low dose, so there is no reason to think that the “naturalness” of a chemical is an indicator of its healthiness…
Further, remember that chemicals are nothing more than arrangements of elements. There is absolutely no reason to think that nature has produced all of the best arrangements or that we are incapable of making an arrangement that is safe or even better than what nature produced….5). A chemical’s properties are determined by the other chemicals that it is bound to
Chemical compounds are made by combining different elements or even molecules, and the final product may not behave the same way as all of its individual parts. Sodium chloride is a classic example of this concept….
Much more simple detail to back up those main points here: '5 simple chemistry facts that everyone should understand before talking about science.'
[Hat tip Bill Evers.]
Here’s Tim Minchin:
.
“My observation is that ‘leadership’ has become a corporate wank-word, a catch-all to describe a fuzzy mélange of personal and organisational actions and behaviours… [H]igh-profile organisations, aided and abetted by the media, take words like ‘leadership’ and use them to create complexity and opacity where none should exist.”
~ by Sam Steele from his latest article at the Footy Almanac titled ‘Does Leadership Matter?’
.
RELATED POSTS:
Truth has neither been the first nor the only casualty of the Syrian civil war, but anyone spending any time on social media in recent days seeing the stories and pictures spewing out purporting to show all manner of dastardlineness committed by refugees from the war will know that truth is among the most recent casualties—and the spew-load tells us the most about about those ready and eager to embrace the untruth.
As I discovered here the other day, neither actual facts nor actual stats are apparently necessary if you’re simply ready to collectivise people.
So I enjoyed this, just one of several pieces debunking sundry bullshit memes about refugees: Calling Bullshit On the Anti-Refugee Memes Flooding the Internet, including
Simple advice: check your shit before you post it. And check it really well before you post it here.
RELATED POSTS:
One of Colin Seymour’s hobbies is collecting nonsense.
There are few more nonsensical prognostications than folk either side of the event that’s on everyone’s mind this week: the Great Wall St Crash that began in earnest on October 24, 1929. Here’s what some numb-nuts had to say, with the times they said them indicated on Colin’s chart above. They offer a great example of hubris when humility would be far more appropriate. Because these people had much to be humble about …
1. "We will not have any more crashes in our time."
- John Maynard Keynes, leading British economist, in 19272. "I cannot help but raise a dissenting voice to statements that we are living in a fool's paradise, and that prosperity in this country must necessarily diminish and recede in the near future."
- E. H. H. Simmons, President, New York Stock Exchange, January 12, 1928"There will be no interruption of our permanent prosperity."
- Myron E. Forbes, President, Pierce Arrow Motor Car Co., January 12, 19283. "No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of the Union, has met with a
more pleasing prospect than that which appears at the present time. In the domestic field there is tranquillity
and contentment...and the highest record of years of prosperity. In the foreign field there is peace, the goodwill
which comes from mutual understanding."
- US President Calvin Coolidge December 4, 19284, "There may be a recession in stock prices, but not anything in the nature of a crash."
- Irving Fisher, leading U.S. economist, New York Times, Sept. 5, 19295. "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. I do not feel there will be soon if ever a
50 or 60 point break from present levels, such as (bears) have predicted. I expect to see the stock market a
good deal higher within a few months."
- Irving Fisher, Ph.D. in economics, Oct. 17, 1929"This crash is not going to have much effect on business."
- Arthur Reynolds, Chairman of Continental Illinois Bank of Chicago, October 24, 1929"There will be no repetition of the break of yesterday... I have no fear of another comparable decline."
- Arthur W. Loasby (President of the Equitable Trust Company), quoted in The New York Times, Friday, October 25, 1929"We feel that fundamentally Wall Street is sound, and that for people who can afford to pay for them outright,
good stocks are cheap at these prices."
- Goodbody and Company market-letter quoted in The New York Times, Friday, October 25, 1929
Those last few comments were just the day or so after the first big crash – in other words, about the same stage in the exact same stage in the cycle as we are now.
And as you’ll probably be aware, those two “leading economists” are still leading us—Keynes and his remedies being well known; Fisher’s doctrine of price stability having helped to cause both this crash and that one. (Fisher lost his shirt in that crash, but unfortunately not his reputation.)
Keynes’s “remedies that weren’t” didn’t take hold until later in the thirties. But it was Fisher who had claimed during the 20s that his “scientific” approach to so-called price stability” had established a “New era of prosperity during the 1920s.” (Ludwig Von Mises published a book in 1928 that critiqued Fisher's approach and predicted that it would lead to an economic crisis and collapse. Mises passed the "market test" while Fisher lost his personal fortune during an economic crisis that his economics help create.)
But the post-crash crystal ball gazing as the numb-nuts followed it all down was no better—some trying to convince themselves, some trying to convince themselves—starting with words that are already sounding very familiar.
6. "This is the time to buy stocks. This is the time to recall the words of the late J. P. Morgan... that any man
who is bearish on America will go broke. Within a few days there is likely to be a bear panic rather than a
bull panic. Many of the low prices as a result of this hysterical selling are not likely to be reached again in
many years."
- R. W. McNeal, market analyst, as quoted in the New York Herald Tribune, October 30, 1929"Buying of sound, seasoned issues now will not be regretted"
- E. A. Pearce market letter quoted in the New York Herald Tribune, October 30, 1929"Some pretty intelligent people are now buying stocks... Unless we are to have a panic -- which no one
seriously believes, stocks have hit bottom."
- R. W. McNeal, financial analyst in October 19297. "The decline is in paper values, not in tangible goods and services...America is now in the eighth year of
prosperity as commercially defined. The former great periods of prosperity in America averaged eleven years.
On this basis we now have three more years to go before the tailspin."
- Stuart Chase (American economist and author), NY Herald Tribune, November 1, 1929"Hysteria has now disappeared from Wall Street."
- The Times of London, November 2, 1929"The Wall Street crash doesn't mean that there will be any general or serious business depression... For six
years American business has been diverting a substantial part of its attention, its energies and its resources
on the speculative game... Now that irrelevant, alien and hazardous adventure is over. Business has come
home again, back to its job, providentially unscathed, sound in wind and limb, financially stronger than ever before."
- Business Week, November 2, 1929"...despite its severity, we believe that the slump in stock prices will prove an intermediate movement and not
the precursor of a business depression such as would entail prolonged further liquidation..."
- Harvard Economic Society (HES), November 2, 19298. "... a serious depression seems improbable; [we expect] recovery of business next spring, with further
improvement in the fall."
- Harvard Economic Society, November 10, 1929"The end of the decline of the Stock Market will probably not be long, only a few more days at most."
- Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics at Yale University, November 14, 1929"In most of the cities and towns of this country, this Wall Street panic will have no effect."
- Paul Block (President of the Block newspaper chain), editorial, November 15, 1929"Financial storm definitely passed."
- Bernard Baruch, cablegram to British Chancellor Winston Churchill, November 15, 19299. "I see nothing in the present situation that is either menacing or warrants pessimism... I have every confidence
that there will be a revival of activity in the spring, and that during this coming year the country will make
steady progress."
- Andrew W. Mellon, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury December 31, 1929"I am convinced that through these measures [public spending, minimum-wage laws] we have
re-established confidence."
- U.S. President Herbert Hoover, December 1929"[1930 will be] a splendid employment year."
- U.S. Dept. of Labor, New Year's Forecast, December 192910. "For the immediate future, at least, the outlook (stocks) is bright."
- Irving Fisher, leading economist, in early 193011. "...there are indications that the severest phase of the recession is over..."
- Harvard Economic Society (HES) Jan 18, 193012. "There is nothing in the situation to be disturbed about."
- Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon, Feb 193013. "The spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern...American business is steadily coming back
to a normal level of prosperity."
- Julius Barnes, head of Hoover's National Business Survey Conference, Mar 16, 193014. "... the outlook continues favourable..."
- Harvard Economic Society, Mar 29, 1930"... the outlook is favourable..."
- Harvard Economic Society, Apr 19, 193015. "While the crash only took place six months ago, I am convinced we have now passed through the worst --
and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover. There has been no significant bank or industrial failure.
That danger, too, is safely behind us."
- Herbert Hoover, President of the United States, May 1, 1930"...by May or June the spring recovery forecast in our letters of last December and November should clearly
be apparent..."
- Harvard Economic Society, May 17, 1930"Gentleman, you have come sixty days too late. The depression is over."
- Herbert Hoover, responding to a delegation requesting a public works program to help speed the recovery,
June 193016. "... irregular and conflicting movements of business should soon give way to a sustained recovery..."
- Harvard Economic Society, June 28, 193017. "... the present depression has about spent its force..."
- Harvard Economic Society, Aug 30, 193018. "We are now near the end of the declining phase of the depression."
- Harvard Economic Society, Nov 15, 193019. "Stabilization at [present] levels is clearly possible."
- Harvard Economic Society, Oct 31, 193120. "All safe deposit boxes in banks or financial institutions have been sealed... and may only be opened in
the presence of an agent of the I.R.S."
- President F.D. Roosevelt, confiscating gold in 1933
South Auckland “community leaders” are warning that “witch doctors” are “infiltrating” South Auckland.
Warnings are being issued about black magic-practicing witch doctors said to be swarming into South Auckland and exploiting vulnerable people. …
"They are here to suck money out of people. They are leaving people in a very devastated state -- suffering mentally, psychologically ... after losing large sums of money," she said.
"It has got to a stage where South Auckland is swarming with [them].”
They promise the earth, suck you dry, and deliver nothing but misery in return.
They’re out there to exploit you.
Be on the lookout for them.
Yes folks. Be on the lookout for politicians, priests and pastors. Outside parliament and its surrounds, there is no place in the country where there are more government programmes, government plans, government agencies, and government-employed welfare agents per-square kilometre, nor more priests, pastors and promisers of bogus salvation. Not to mention “community leaders.” Because for all their promises, all their sizzling state solutions and “wrap-around support,” they’ve left people there in a devastated state.
These bastards have done way more harm than a little bit of simulated voodoo.
RELATED POSTS:
They’re laughing in Nigeria.
Idiocy leads to illness.* The anti-vaccine movement is now fuelling a measles epidemic “spreading outward from Disneyland in California,” says bioscientist Steven Salzberg, in what he calls “the worst outbreak in years.”
Atlanta's Center for Disease Control (CDC) reports that in just the past month, 84 people from 14 states contracted measles, a number that is certainly an under-estimate, because the CDC doesn’t record every case. California alone has 59 confirmed cases, most of them linked to an initial exposure in Disneyland. A majority of people who have gotten sick were not vaccinated.
For years, scientists (including me) have warned that the anti-vaccination movement was going to cause epidemics of disease. Two years ago I wrote that the anti-vaccine movement had caused the worst whooping cough epidemic in 70 years. And now it’s happening with measles.
Finally, though, the public seems to be pushing back. Parents are starting to wake up to the danger that the anti-vax movement represents to their children and themselves…
Most of the anti-vax crowd have no scientific training or expertise, which might explain (but doesn’t excuse) their complete ignorance of the science. Over the past 15 years, dozens of studies involving hundreds of thousands of people have shown convincingly that neither vaccines nor any of the ingredients in them are linked to autism. Vaccines are not only safe, but they are perhaps the greatest public health success in the history of civilization.
Measles, though, is dangerous.
Not least to children whose immune systems aren’t functioning properly like Rhett Krawitt,” a 6-year-old California boy who has gone through 4 years of chemotherapy for childhood leukemia. His leukemia is in remission and he’s back in school, but the treatment wiped out his immunity, and he’s still not ready to get vaccinated. If Rhett gets measles, he might not survive.”
Salzberg reckons parents should “stop listening to nonsense, and choose wisely by getting their children vaccinated against measles.”
Time to repost this fabulous guest post by Linda from the fabulously rational Autism and Oughtisms, written for any parents worried about making a vaccination decision in the face of so many anti-vaccine stories.
The TAB has earned great coverage from their gimmick promoting the Soccer World Cup, offering a prize of $5 million if you can correctly predict all 64 World Cup games.
This is going several results better than the German octopus from the last Cup, and on the face of it looks “gettable,” says the Royal New Zealand Herald.
“It’s gettable, but it’s hard – that’s why it’s five million dollars.”
The experts at Crowd Goes Wild reckon you and I might have a shot, but.
“An expert is less likely to win it than someone who just has a shot at it.”
“It’s only 64 games and, as I say, there’s only 20 tricky ones I reckon”
So what are your odds?
Thomas Lumley at Stats Chat has calculated them for your. Your chance of winning, he says, would be 1 in 5,227,573,613,485,916,806,405,226,496.
At those odds, the value of an entry is approximately 1 ten-thousand-million-billionth of a cent (10-19 cents).
Just for a comparison, this is somewhat considerably more unlikely than the odds of being struck by lightning (576,000 to 1), drowning in the bath (685,000 to 1), or having a meteor fall on your house (182,138,880,000,000 to 1).
As Mr Lumley points out,
If you can predict a dozen of the games with perfect accuracy and get 70% right for the rest, you’d be much better off just betting.
And if you can’t, why not just try Lotto – the odds for which, on average, say you’d expect to win once in every 18453 years and 9 months.
Easy money.
Since there’s been much debate and misunderstanding about an alleged link between vaccines and autism, I asked Linda from the fabulously rational Autism and Oughtisms blog to write this Guest Post for any parents worried about making a vaccination decision in the face of so many anti-vaccine stories.
Fear of the unknown drives people to do crazy things. They’ll cling desperately to proposed answers -- however poorly supported those answers are -- merely because they are answers; any explanation is considered better than no explanation at all. Add in the desperation of a parent trying to help their suffering child, and a sense that someone must surely be to blame for the child’s suffering, and you have a recipe for things to go very badly.
Trying to understand why so many parents (mostly mothers) of autistic children won’t let go of the “vaccines cause autism” hypothesis requires some appreciation of what these mothers have gone through. That understanding can’t and won’t excuse them pushing an anti-vaccine agenda in the face of endless scientific proof to the contrary, but I think it helps to get a grip on why these parents just won’t move on from the idea.
Since I stilll have this conversation about this fad diet with someone at least once a week (sigh), here’s TED Fellow Christina Warinner, an expert on ancient diets, answering the question:
So how much of this "Paleo Diet" stuff is based on an actual Paleolithic diet?
The answer is not really any of it.
Who’s Christina Warinner, and what the hell would she know? Well…
Dr. Christina Warinner has excavated around the world, from the Maya jungles of Belize to the Himalayan mountains of Nepal, and she is pioneering the biomolecular investigation of archaeological dental calculus (tartar) to study long-term trends in human health and diet. She is a 2012 TED Fellow, and her work has been featured in Wired UK, the Observer, CNN.com, Der Freitag, and Sveriges TV. She obtained her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010, specializing in ancient DNA analysis and paleodietary reconstruction.