Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Of Science And Mythology

Scientists could learn a lot by looking at myths.  It is my experience as a student of science, an appreciator of the classics, and something of an expert in the ancient end of history as it relates to how people think and once thought that scientists tend to see mythology as anathema.  For many of them it is like a monstrous creature of subjectivity that corrupts and destroys all efforts to be objective and advance modern enlightenment.  It is their arch nemesis in their quest to free our minds from superstitions that hold back progress and make us do terrible things.  But I think their near repulsion at mythology is just another form of superstition.  They have allowed their fears and bad memories to make irrational impressions on their worldviews.

Science and mythology have a great deal in common.  I actually suspect, and no doubt many historians would say my suspicion is well founded, that science has grown out of mythology.  And like a child would have a lot in common with her parent so science has a great deal in common with mythology.  

They both use agreed upon and strictly adhered to methodologies.  A priest/storyteller can't just start to make things up any more than a scientist can just declare his new theory to be of merit.  Both mythology and science use peer review and communities defined by credentials.

In fact myths and scientific models are extremely similar.  They both attempt to explain natural phenomenon.  And both are developed as a result of long periods of observation.  Sure the methodologies may be radically different in ways but the over-all thought architecture is virtually the same.  From observations models are devised and then over time with further observation the models are tested.

Now what happens when believed in myths and scientific models fail to predict contemporary events is also quite similar.  Similar enough that scientists who experience such a situation might just gain useful perspective by considering the larger picture that contains both their models and mythology.

In both cases people are extremely hesitant to question the myth or model.  They start looking for ways in which they may have some how influenced the "gods" in order to bring about the unexpected result.  Whether they suspect sins, poor adherence to scientific methodology, or yet unsolved mysteries that will leave their precious model intact once revealed, it's essentially the same path of reasoning for the ancient priest or modern scientist.  Subjective and objective thinking becomes hard to distinguish.  It is almost as if square pegs need to be pounded into round holes and the pressure to do so is more than sufficient to achieve the task.

Now anyone who dares to use the occasion to question the myth or model tends to be perceived as motivated by either unbridled ambitions or a lack of respect for the religion or science.  Simply allowing the few who dare to question to do so without significant threat could destroy the structure of credentialed peer review that lends credibility to the community.  If a few can question the very myth or model without the support of peer review and be right then the very merit of peer review could come into question.

So those who question have their credibility attacked while their actual ideas are either not addressed or misrepresented using the straw-man argument or otherwise set aside using any other logical fallacy that can be slipped by the unsuspecting.  They can't give fair consideration to the actual ideas presented in the challenge since to do so would be to give credibility to the challenges that arrived outside the blessings of peer review.

Now with that said allow me to present to you some documented excerpts from authoritative sources on an issue in science that is influencing public policy, global climate change.  Go find your best big-word decoder ring and let's go.

"The last million years on Earth have been one long ice age, interrupted regularly by interglacials, or brief periods of warmth. The warm spells have usually lasted between 10,000 and 20,000 years. We're in one now that began about 12,000 years ago.  So any millennium now the temperature will drop, glaciers will grow, and ice sheets thousands of kilometers thick will advance on the continents, devouring a largefraction of the land on the planet."


~ Houghton Mifflin Science

"As a reviewer admitted, "failures to support the Milankovitch theory may only reflect the inadequacies of the models.""

"By the start of the 21st century, it was clear that the connection between global temperature and greenhouse gas levels was a major geological force. All through the Pleistocene, the greenhouse gas feedback had turned the planet's orbital cycles from minor climate variations to grand transformations that affected all life on the planet. The geological record gave a striking verification, with wholly independent methods and data, of the processes that computer models were predicting would bring a rapid and severe global warming — a disruption of climate exceeding anything seen since the emergence of the human species."

~ Past Climate Cycles
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/cycles.htm

The discrepancy between the predicted “signature” of anthropogenic greenhouse
warming and its absence in half a century of observed temperature records is
currently under active discussion among climatologists. A report by the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP, 2006), says –

“For longer-timescale temperature changes over 1979 to 1999, only one of four observed upper-air data sets has larger tropical warming aloft than in the surface records.” [Even this single dataset does not show enough troposphere warming to match the models’ predictions that justify the UN’s high central estimate of climate sensitivity to anthropogenic greenhouse warming]. 

“All model runs with surface warming over this period show amplified warming aloft. These results could arise due to errors common to all models; to significant non-climatic influences remaining within some or all of the observational data sets, leading to biased long-term trend estimates; or a combination of these factors. The new evidence in this Report (model-to-model consistency of amplification results, the large uncertainties in observed tropospheric temperature trends, and independent physical evidence supporting substantial tropospheric warming) favors the second explanation. A full resolution of this issue will require reducing the large observational uncertainties that currently exist. These uncertainties make it difficult to determine whether models still have common, fundamental errors in their representation of the vertical structure of atmospheric temperature change.”

Applying Occam’s Razor, the simplest explanation for the discrepancy between theoretical modeling and real-world observation is that the models on which the case for alarm about climate change are based have very substantially overestimating the effect of anthropogenic greenhouse warming on global temperatures. The Climate Change Science Program, however, prefers to assume that it is observation, rather than theory, that is deficient."

 ~ Science & Public Policy Institute
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/greenhouse_warming_what_greenhouse_warming_.html

Now to attempt to make sense of all of this in light of myths and scientific models.  While, as the Science & Public Policy Institute says there are a lot of climatologists questioning the current models that suggest human activity is a significant factor in global climate change, and even the most fundamental science supports cooling and not warming as dominant on the larger scale of time, that is not what most are hearing from those in positions of power.  I hope I may have given you a plausible reason why that is.  Just like challenging myths, challenging scientific models challenges the importance of peer review and the credibility of the scientific and political communities that invest in these models.  They are ruled by their idols created through the inevitably imperfect craftsmanship of human efforts and are unwilling to brave the humble ground of admitting they are in fact just as human as the rest of us.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

The Government Is Not Us

I could not think of what would be appropriate to write on a day like this when groups of politicians fight over our country's future like vultures and ravens trying to determine on which side of the road the corpse will rest while they pick its bones clean.

That's not really the way I see this latest contest of wills between the Democrats and the Republicans, but it pretty well sums up the way a lot of people do see it.  They want to believe there are better ways to get government's business done than what they see happening.  You know, like what they were taught in school about how government works

Those last two words are the problem in that.  The textbooks gave most of us a very wrong impression.  If the percentage of the time that government works was a score for a school grade it would be an 'F' across the last couple decades and many decades prior.  At it's best, on a federal level it could manage a 'C' across a year here or there.  The idea that government works as a rule is wrong.  It works more often than not but that's about it.  And that's not because there is anything wrong with our government.  It's a just a fact about how organizations of all kinds lose efficiency as they grow.

What works about America and always has been what works is not its government but the American people.  Currently our government has grown so big and cumbersome that it threatens to pull us down into the same state that is its norm, that of minimal functionality.

My warning to my fellow Americans is to not mistake our government for us.  Lincoln said it is a government "of" the people and he was right, but that does not mean it is the people.  It means it belongs to us and not us to it.

So as the politicians battle over the carcass of government (not America) let us read a great poem about freedom and liberty by the Scottish poet Robert Burns.  And one does not need to be Scottish to appreciate it because it is about liberty, and liberty you see never misses an opportunity to recognize that individual nations and people are distinct and allowing for that is part of liberty's mission.


I.
    Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled,
    Scots, wham Bruce has aften led;
    Welcome to your gory bed,
      Or to glorious victorie!
II.
    Now's the day, and now's the hour--
    See the front o' battle lour;
    See approach proud Edward's power--
      Edward! chains and slaverie!
III.
    Wha will be a traitor-knave?
    Wha can fill a coward's grave?
    Wha sae base as be a slave?
      Traitor! coward! turn and flee!
IV.
    Wha for Scotland's king and law
    Freedom's sword will strongly draw,
    Freeman stand, or freeman fa',
      Caledonian! on wi' me!
V.
    By oppression's woes and pains!
    By our sons in servile chains!
    We will drain our dearest veins,
      But they shall be--shall be free!
VI.
    Lay the proud usurpers low!
    Tyrants fall in every foe!
    Liberty's in every blow!
      Forward! let us do, or die!

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

There Is Nothing New Under The Sun

A critical scene is claiming most of my creative energies this week, so once again I bring you something from September 2013.

+++++++++++++++

Why do some people see the long of things and others don't?  It's not age though that can make a difference, but I know "old" people (70+) who think the whole world is coming to an end or at the very least we have seen our best days, and I know people much younger who see that history just keeps repeating itself and both the good and the bad come and go and then yet come again.  Can we pick out what it is that makes these people see the world so differently?

Maybe it's like another difference in world perspectives.  Some people believe history is a near constant progression of change, that we come across moments in history where there is no turning back and something is with us to stay.  Those who believe history repeats itself, their perspective is also the one contrary to the "near constant progression" folks.

This all started percolating for me while I was listening to George Will being interviewed on Reason.tv.  In this interview he talked about his growing libertarian leanings but he qualified that he believed we will always have big government.  I encourage you to listen to his own words on this but my paraphrase is that he believes we are at a point where so many and so much is drawing benefit from big government, which includes the current tax code, that it would be unrealistic to ever expect to shrink government and eliminate the progressive income tax.

Will seems to be one of those believers in historical progressions that lead us to points of no return and I beg to differ with him.

"There is nothing new under the sun."  That's more my view of things.  That is not to say we don't make things better or worse from time to time, and it is definitely not to say we shouldn't work to make things better.  But what it does say is nothing in the area of social or political change is ever permanent.  Like rising and falling of tides, whatever we chase away or comes to beset us, a counter force will inevitably come along.

We get rid of kings in the United States and along come a snobbish political and academic elite that want the same oppressive and equally unjustified authority we spent our blood to free ourselves from.  Likewise history is well stocked with examples of regimes who tried to claim unchallengeable authority who met their inevitable demise.  Usually collapsing in on themselves due to corruption and ineptitude bread of that same corruption but also often brought down by force.

Some reject this view of history because they believe it means we don't achieve anything and we waste our time trying, but that's just a matter of how one wants to see things.  A determined negative person can see both views of history as equally negative.  Will's apparent view can be seen to mean there is no point in trying to achieve certain things, no matter how good they may be, because history has spoken and slammed the door on any opportunity to achieve it.  But I believe a positive person is best served by the view that history repeats itself and not the constant progression view.

We live in a world where the weather changes and yet we find ways to stay warm in cold months and cool in hot ones, and we are ever finding better and better ways to achieve this.  Still, no matter how far we may ever come we can expect the cold and hot seasons to keep coming.  This is how I view the cycles of history.  Liberty grows and wanes.  The great American experiment in liberty wasn't the first time liberty expanded against tyranny and the growth of the United States government and the imposition of its unwieldy overly controlling income tax system wasn't the first time tyranny started to oppress.

What's different about this most recent great experiment in the expansion of liberty is that it was better conceived to survive the ebb and flows of history (see the Constitution).  Like with our modern air-conditioning and heating technology there is now a lesser chance of being dictated to by external forces.  Our current state is analogous to a winter where our house's insulation is proven inadequate.  We are not doomed.  We just need to fix up the house.  The winter of tyranny comes and goes.  Some times we ride through with almost not a notice and other times our protections prove inadequate, but the over-all trend is a positive one where each winter as a general rule will be less troublesome than the one before it.

The forces of collectivism and growing dependence on government do act a lot like erosion and given no effort to counter them everything will eventually be made useless and flat, but that is not the trend of history we see in human records.  There is another force at work that rebuilds what is torn down and makes it better.

George Will and I agree on many things it seems but not his view of changes that cannot be undone.  Nothing is ever done such that it cannot be undone and that's a good thing.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

The Individual In Autumn : Again

Family issues are taking up my time right now, so I will be re-posting a previous post.  This one's from September 2013.

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The Individual In Autumn

What I've Written So Far


I write about many things at 3PI Eddie Fontaigne, politics, fiction writing, ethics, but mostly individual liberty.  That's what usually gets my dander up and also what tends to tie into all the other subjects.  I might even argue that much of what life is about is being an individual defined separately from any collective, of course a good one who helps other individuals in their own life's-quests, and who try not to hinder others in this same quest.


Common Questions


Some of my fellow Christians may wonder how I fit that into my faith, and I will tell them it's quite easy in fact.  Christ didn't come to establish a relationship with that person over there's community, He came to establish a relationship with that person.

Likewise some of my fellow travelers in academic circles may wonder how I fit strong individualism with being a Christian, or even one who likes tradition in general.  Once again it's not hard at all.  Christ's church as He and the apostles speak of it is made up of individuals who's only necessary commonality is that they have a positive relationship with Him.  Many books of the Bible are radical documents in that they emphasize individuals over collectives, and those that don't share this emphasis don't contradict it.  If you don't believe me, try reading any part of the Bible that you are told emphasizes collectivist oriented things like social justice or holy nations, then read them through and in context.  You will inevitably come across something addressing individuals who will be blessed or cursed in spite of and not because of what the community they happen to be in is up to.

I'd recommend Habakkuk and the Beatitudes as a great examples of my point.  In Habakkuk God is speaking of the punishment he will bring upon the nation of Israel.  The social justice crowd of today love to point out how Israel is being punished because so many of its rich had neglected laws designed to help the poor and needy, but they of course miss the meaning of the part where God speaks of blessing those who have been obedient and merciful.  The meaning isn't obscure at all, and it is that individuals are accountable for their own individual character, not that of some collective they happen to be a part of.  Then in the Beatitudes Jesus lists one statement after another promising blessings on individuals with good character, ultimate though not necessarily contemporary blessings, but blessings for all the traits one can only rationally ascribe to individuals, not collectives.

Tradition in general is also something I easily associate with strong individualism, and that's because traditions are, when they're practical, very practical, and many of the ones seen as impractical are often later to be found as practical.  That practicality makes them things individuals can empower their own quests with, as they choose or don't choose.  The point of individualism isn't to just be different for the sake of being different.  It's to be different in whatever way seeks to maximize one's own value to others.

"Value to others?", one might ask.  Yes.  If the only thoughts you can afford is about getting food, finding shelter, and reproducing, you may as well be living the life of a single-celled organism.  Just to have the time and opportunity for individual expression requires help and cooperation from others.  The difference between an individualist and a collectivist is in where one seeks to concentrate the power and the benefits of a community.  The collectivist seeks to empower the collective while the individualist seeks to empower every individual they may come across.  Another way of saying it is in terms of tools.  For the collectivist the individual is a tool that serves the collective.  For an individualist the collective is a tool that serves the individual.  Getting back to the point, all individuals can only be empowered if we serve each other, and in serving each other, if we do it to empower individuals, each individual, so benefiting, has the best chance to benefit others.

3PI in other words.  Individualists cherish the individual liberty and dignity of other individuals, for to do otherwise would be hypocritical.  Communities made of 3PI individualists are synergistic.  Each individual is better off, having greater freedom to be themselves and make their own decisions.

Some of these issues I just discussed, I did so very generally and quickly.  Below is a list of links to more detailed discussions I've presented on various issues and questions related to the individual.

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

How Many More Days?

A year ago the big issue in the middle east was Syria.  Now the big issue is a festering wound calling itself the Islamic State Of Iraq And Syira, or ISIS.  In other words, the result of neglecting to establish sound policies a year ago.  Now at the risk of coming across as myopic and geocentic I feel I must remind folks of what I think is the best summary of world politics today.  It was said over a year ago by John Bolton.   One simply needs to do the math to bring it up to date.

"I think what we have to do now is explain to the rest of the world that basically we’re in a 1200 day period when the president is not going to be effective but that doesn't mean America can’t be reinstated into its proper place once we get a real president in Washington."

More important than changing the day count to around 800 is asking how much worse may things get before "those who have much" can resume effectively answering the call when "much is expected".

As for the White House, the only questions the rest of the free world should be asking is will it hinder them in their efforts to cope, and what can they hope to see from it once the current occupant of the office of president vacates?

One possible strategy has come to mind, one similar to how NATO managed to pull a reluctant Bill Clinton into the Balkans.  If the UK and France, and possibly even Germany, determine to move forward with a workable plan, Obama might be shamed into going along with US resources.   Ah but Obama is certainly not Clinton.  Unlike Clinton, Obama has no interest in being seen as leading in such a matter.  Where as Clinton was more than happy to take over and claim credit (even if the successes had to be manufactured in the press), Obama seems to want nothing to do with military interventions.  Even his surge in Afghanistan was something he seemed to be drug to kicking and screaming to for the sake of his re-election chances.  And now he's got no such concern.

Based on what we know about Obama, I wouldn't blame our allies for believing such a ploy would blow up in their faces.  They probably are secretly wishing they could just replace Obama with Perry now.  But it doesn't work that way.  So is it 800 days, more, less?  Do they have the exact number being tracked somewhere?  I would if I were them.