Category — Technology & Science

I think this Amanda Marcotte piece is pretty interesting.  She touches on the idea of work and community and how the modern workplace has, until very recently, served to cut us off entirely from our loved ones during the day.  This, she asserts, was not always the case.  People used to come into more contact with their loved ones during the day in the past and this served to create a more organic, more humane work place.  She riffs off a TED talk by Stefana Broadbent (below) which talks about how modern communication technology has actually allowed people to regain some of this ability to communicate with loved ones during the work day.

What Broadbent recorded was that the explosion in communications technologies are instead restoring a little bit of what was simply part of life 150 years ago—constant contact with your intimates during your work day.  If you’re over 30, you’ve probably marveled at how much the work day has changed because of this, and as Broadbent notes, it’s extremely different from the era when even personal phone calls were not part of life at work.  (And still aren’t in many blue collar jobs.) It used to be that once you were in the office, the outside world simply didn’t exist.  Huge news events could happen and you wouldn’t find out, and you were mostly ignorant about what your friends and relatives were up to during the day.  Now, between text messaging, cell phones, IM, and social networking, we spend huge portions of our days keeping lines of communication with our intimates open.

But of course, since the isolation was the product of culture, we can’t expect culture not to strike back.  Broadbent notes how people who work in many low status occupations, like bus drivers and factor workers, are facing increasingly punitive monitoring to make sure they don’t check in with family and friends during the day.  Broadbent treats this like a human rights violation, and I’m inclined to agree. If people are getting their work done, monitoring them to make sure they don’t use their downtime to talk to people they love is only going on in order to debase them and suggest that their personal lives don’t count.  I’ll go a step further and argue that the monitoring is valuing debasement and control of working class people over actual economic concerns like profit and saving money.  It uses resources to monitor workers, after all.  But more than that, I’m skeptical of the idea that unhappy people are better workers.  People who can’t communicate with loved ones often spend a lot of their mental energies worrying about those loved ones, in my experience.  Communication that you can control doesn’t offer nearly the distraction that your colleagues can offer by barging in and demanding your attention whenever they want, too.

This makes sense to me.  Then again, the average high school student in America spends five and a half hours a day in front of a screen, and there is little doubt in my mind that this sort of always-online-or-watching-tv culture is bad for society in the long run.  Nor is our increased sedentary lifestyle exactly beneficial to our societal health or temperament. 

That being said, I think the benefits of technology should not be overlooked either, and if new avenues of communication are allowing friends and loved ones to keep in touch more, that’s undeniably a very good thing.

I’ve always thought a more likely reason for our atomization was our car culture.  The ability for families to spread out over such long distances, and the need to drive to get anywhere at all have led to people living further and further apart from one another.  My mom had seven siblings other than herself, and each one lives in a different city now, with their own families.  Only one stayed in her home town.  This was unheard of a generation previously.  Now it is the status quo.  My family has chosen a different path, and has decided to stay in our home town where our families live so that our children will have deeper and stronger ties to their community than we did growing up. 

In any case, I think it is the physical distance we have placed between ourselves and our neighbors, families, and friends that has contributed most to our atomization, and which has led directly to the more psychological and spiritual distances we see forming – as our children are raised either in single-parent homes or without any real connections to their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and communities in general.  In some sense, then, the communication technologies we have developed allow us to compensate for this distance.  Rather than blaming social networking or other communications technology for our increased atomization, perhaps we should view them as a subconscious attempt to remedy something we, as a culture, barely understand about ourselves – as an attempt to bridge the distances between one another.

Watch the TED talk after the leap.

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Ages, places, and nations sometimes have characteristic architectural forms. Sometimes these forms, like vinyl-clad McMansions, or the decrepit and vaguely totalitarian National Mall, tell you things about a culture that its members would rather not know, and surely most places and times have an architecture of that kind. Other forms are characteristic not only of some virtue or vice in a society, however, but its self-understanding. The greatest of these forms was probably the cathedral in the high and late Middle Ages, which was simultaneously an expression of the aesthetic, economic, and political aspirations of a community as well as an act of humility before G-d, echoing the incarnation by uniting G-d and man. Nowadays we capitalist Westerners have our own entrant, which is of course the skyscraper.

Skyscapers are like cathedrals in another way: they contain a place within the building that is natural to treat as sacred. In the cathedral this space was the center of the cross formed by the nave and the transept, and in the skyscraper it is the highest floor of the building. What we use this space for can tell us about ourselves, I think. Observation decks are therefore a symbol of modernity, and an important one. They are open to the public and serve no purpose other than to gratify the mind and the eye with the sight of the city spread out below. This gratification, I suggest, is one of the many ways in which modernity is actually more Christian than the Middle Ages.

Nothing like the scientific method was found in antiquity, and what glimmers of it appeared in the Middle Ages were feeble. The systematic use of the method, institutionalized in journals and laboratories, is characteristically modern, but the psychology of the scientists who employ it represents a Christian ideal. Many scientists seem to feel a passionate, personal joy at the ordered reasonableness of the universe, or more specifically, that it is reasonable, but its reasons are never exhausted. This joy is a species of the joy in being qua being that Aquinas, speaking for the Christian tradition, claimed to be the proper disposition of all Christians toward the created order.  You have to know some scientists personally, I think, to realize that scientists are like this, because scientists themselves are not encouraged to articulate it, though sometimes you do hear statements in the press about how a new finding is “really darn cool.”

Being happy merely to see and to understand, as scientists are, is the feeling responsible for observation decks, whose most intellectually incurious and aesthetically stolid visitors thrill with joy as they marvel at the works of Man and discover how familiar neighborhoods tessellate. Though surmise about the psychology of ages past is hazardous, I’ll venture to guess that the civilization of the modern West has privileged and encouraged joy in the way the universe works more than any civilization in history.

I write all of this by way of introduction, since this is my first post at the League and much of my blogging will be characterized by choleric and occasionally intemperate hostility towards liberal democracy and industrial capitalism, such that you might mistake me for a Front Porcher in an ordinary gentleman’s clothing. So, while I am interested in the alienation of man from himself that is peculiar to modernity, I don’t forget that modernity has created new possibilities of experience we would do wrong to abandon. I also believe that the joy I described above animates the best bloggers on the internet, and I hope it will characterize my own blogging here.

Opponents of high speed rail make several points about its viability: rail is a “19th century” mode of transportation; rail would be under-used and therefore would need massive subsidies to function; infrastructure in the cities connected by high speed rail is not sufficient to make this form of transportation efficient or cost-effective; even if rail is eventually necessary, right now it is impractical due to the ready supply of cheap oil.  Others point to the fact that the contracts for these rail systems will largely go to foreign companies, thus raising questions about their stimulative effects here at home.

I think these are all very good arguments.  And if we had an endless supply of oil and gas, and thus an endless source of cheap fossil fuels for our car-culture, I think that they would be good enough arguments to discourage any support of federal high speed rail projects.  However at some point I believe we will be short enough on fuel that it will become cost-prohibitive to commute or travel long distances in cars.  Having a rail infrastructure in place at that point will be instrumental in shifting toward a less car-driven economy. Local efforts to remake cities along more pedestrian and mass-transit lines can be more focused since the big inter-city travel routes will be developed already.

Of course there are difficulties. Rail suffers the same disadvantage alternative energy suffers: that is, heavily subsidized fossil fuels and a modern infrastructure built entirely around the use of fossil fuels make any effort to compete nearly impossible – at least not without further subsidies.  Removing subsides for fossil fuels could help level the playing field, but I don’t see that happening ever really. No politician wants that blood on their hands.  Nor do I see a sensible carbon tax replacing the silly and probably doomed attempt at cap and trade.

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With all the myriad  commentary flying around about about the meaning of Scott Brown’s victory, it would help to remember that people who follow politics write about politics.  This creates a bias whereby the majority of people voting are perceived as voting based on political reasons (as defined and understood by the commentariat).

The reality is otherwise.  People vote emotionally.  Specifically, they vote with their limbic system.  The famed “most people” don’t have time to wonkishly pour over political details, therefore they intuit (correctly, I would argue) that their rational neocortex brain is not really the best indicator of what they should do.  Hence they rely on their limbic brain (a product of our mammalian ancestry).

Drew Westen, one of the leading proponents of neuro-politics, has shown (persuasively, in my opinion) that elections basically boil down to 5 topics, in decreasing order of significance from the top down.

1. Party image (narrative), a sense of identity to the cause
2. Personal Qualities of Leader of Party (ability to connect to people emotionally)
3. “Gut” Qualities of Leader (can they trust you, cool under pressure, appear disciplined, etc.)
4. Policy Proposals
5. Facts about Policy Proposals

So with Coakley-Brown, let’s go through that list.

1. The party image of the Dems is down.  Health care is part of that, but more importantly, I believe, is a lack of narrative (including but not limited to an oppositional narrative to create distinction).

2. Coakley was a horrible candidate.  Particularly horrible insofar as she was aloof, emotionally tepid (if not outright cold), and appeared to be a robotic, party-machine hack.  In contrast, Scott Brown is more media-friendly, outgoing, and “likable”.

3.  A push here, I would say.  The only real hurdle was for Brown, as the insurgent candidate, to prove he was reliable.  Or at least not unreliable by massively screwing up his campaign.  (Which he didn’t do.)

4/5 have to do with special Massachusetts circumstances and the health care debate, but in the end #1-3 are what make the biggest difference.

To wit, (h/t Andrew Sullivan), here is Nate Silver on last night’s election:

The final score: national environment 13, Coakley 14, special circumstances 4.

If you follow through on the math, this would suggest that Coakley would have won by about 8 points, rather than losing by 5, had the national environment not deteriorated so significantly for Democrats. It suggests that the Democrats would have won by 9 points, rather than losing by 5, had the candidate been someone other than Coakley. And it suggests that the race would have been a 1-point loss (that is, basically too close to call), rather than a 5-point loss, even if Coakley had run such a bad campaign and even if the national environment had deteriorated as much as it has, but had there not been the unusual circumstances associated with this particular election.

In other words, national environment (bad for Dems)=#1, Coakley (emotionally disconnected, un-energetic candidate)=#2, Special Local Circumstances=#4 + 5

Numbers four and five, the things Democrats hem and haw about so much works out to about a 4% difference.  So when White House Dems blame Coakley they are right.  When Coakley Dems blame the national environment (and the White House by extension) they are also (in part) right.

But generally Dems (particularly progressives) spend all their time arguing over the 4% that really isn’t the difference maker.

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Afterthought:  Humans have three basic brain systems:  neocortex (rational thought), limbic (the emotional, nurturing brain), and reptilian (fight/flight mechanism).  If a candidate/party wants to smear another candidate they usually attack using the trust factor (#3) by lighting up the reptilian brain.  Republicans of course have become adept at this over the years with their constant “scare tactics” (Though a Democrat like Hillary Clinton used the same technique in her run). Democrats have typically responded to such “fear-mongering” (i.e. reptilian-brain excitation) with “rational” responses which don’t work because they are not responding on the level at which the issue was first raised and often fail to use the limbic system to connect to voters emotionally.

I appreciate Tim Kowal’s long, thoughtful response to my post on Ben Stein and intelligent design, but after reading and re-reading it I’m afraid it misses the mark.  Lines like “Strictly speaking, natural selection is not a scientific theory” only help to harden that impression. They don’t call it the Theory of Evolution for nothing.

Science, as I see it, is the process by which we as humans attempt to better understand the natural world.  Whether we want to phrase this as “God’s creation” or merely as “the natural world” is unimportant.  When it comes to actually taking apart the radio and figuring out how it works, we don’t need to ask whether it was made by hand or by a machine, in America or overseas. All we need to do is take it apart and then put it back together.  Similarly, with science – whether it is biology or geology or physics – all we need to do is ask the question “how?”

How does it all tick?

That, to me, is science.  The exploration of how the natural world ticks.  To me, as a person of faith, I think of this as a way to better understand God also, to understand how creation ticks. I find the anthropomorphizing of God in “theories” like Intelligent Design to be insulting both to God and to my intelligence.

Let me explain.  Let’s take, for example, the rock cycle.  This is the natural cycle whereby rock is pressed down into the earth and then reemerges as magma.  That rock – now igneous rock – is  pressed slowly down into the earth, turns into sedimentary and then metamorphic rock, and finally is melted down once again into magma.  It is a process which takes millions upon millions of years.  Understanding this process helps us understand the earth beneath our feet (and a great deal more) and it is entirely irrelevant to our understanding of this process whether or not it was created or designed by God.  If a group of Intelligent Rock Cycle Designers came around arguing that instead of this being a natural process it was instead one guided by some other Intelligence, I simply fail to see how their alternative theory would be at all useful to our understanding of the rock cycle.

But does it diminish from it? [Read more →]

At Master Resource, Jim Manzi synthesizes several objections he’s aired to comprehensive greenhouse gas regulations in one easy-to-read Thomas Friedman take-down. I find this stuff pretty persuasive, but it’s worth noting that there’s real tension between objections to cap-and-trade grounded in rigorous cost-benefit analysis and objections to cap-and-trade grounded in, well, Senator Inhofe’s belief that “global warming is the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people.”

At its core, Manzi’s argument hinges on accepting the scientific consensus with respect to both the existence of global climate change and its probable impact. He uses the UN’s own projections to argue the economic costs of regulation outweigh the likelihood of catastrophic warming. On the other end of the conservative spectrum, we have people like Rick Santorum, whose recent op-ed helpfully compares  anthropogenic global warming to other well-known examples of crank science like The Theory of Evolution.

Aside from lazily gesturing at the uncertainty of scientific knowledge and repeating “ClimateGate” over and over again, Santorum doesn’t really have an argument against the existence of climate change. Unfortunately, this outlook seems to be the dominant strain of thought on the American Right (granted, the leaked CRU emails didn’t help matters). The problem with this approach is that straightfoward denialism is totally inconsistent with any attempt to grapple with the real costs of emissions controls – if there’s no danger from unregulated greenhouse gasses, why bother to see if the actual science of global warming demands immediate action?

Straightforward denialism allows those who favor aggressive emissions controls to shape the public’s perception of climate science. Instead of sober cost-benefit analysis, people who basically accept the existence of global warming (read: most of the voting public) are now more likely to think that climate change is catastrophic rather than incremental. The longer the right’s response to anthropogenic warming is dominated by the likes of Inhofe and Santorum, the longer this perception will linger, which doesn’t bode well for efforts to stop monstrously expensive cap-and-trade legislation.

“If anyone tries to tell you that uncertainty about climate change is a reason for inaction, he’s either a fool or a scoundrel. Probably a bit of both.” ~ Mark Kleiman

Kleiman makes a number of assumptions in his piece before reaching this one.  He assumes some hypothetical climate change statistics and then assumes that because he has made such a speculation that the policy going forward should be precautionary against said speculative fiction.  But simply because Mark Kleiman says that we might see an 8 degree (C) increase in temperature by 2100 does not make it so.

Writes Kleiman:

Ordinarily, it is the proponents of action who bear the burden of persuasion.  But in this case political inaction means, in effect, licensing a massive gamble, though no individual chooses to make it. Rather, the gamble would be the outcome of billions of uncoordinated self-interested decisions: precisely the sort of process that, in the absence of external costs, leads to efficient outcomes.  But none of the arguments for the freedom of economic activity applies to activities with huge, indirect, deferred, and diffuse external costs:  by contrast with Adam Smith’s baker, there is simply no “invisible hand” mechanism that directs private action in such a situation in the direction of the public interest.

Actually, just like with any free market, climate change will respond to market pressures coupled with government incentives.  Rising fuel costs will reduce the amount of fuel used and the less people drive and fewer things are shipped via truck and freighter, the lower our CO2 emissions will be.  The government can invest in mass transit to help ease in a different norm for transportation as traditional fuel, and therefore traditional means of travel, becomes more and more prohibitively expensive.  Private innovators can be allowed to come up with the next revolutionary inventions in renewable energy and green transportation.  The government can issue tax credits to innovators and consumers who participate in the green revolution.  They can also provide more grants to college students pursuing science and engineering degrees.

These are positive steps rather than punitive ones.  The punitive measures should be directed at individual players – polluters and industries which have the largest hand in producing emissions.  Cap and trade is too broad and too subject to capture to be effective.  Targeting specific polluters makes more sense, while nudging normal Americans toward a different energy and transportation model in the future. [Read more →]

Damon Linker on appeals to common sense in American politics is worth reading, even if he overlooks the fact that like all rhetorical tropes, celebrating the intuition of the American people is a thoroughly bipartisan tendency (FDR: “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails: admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”) But I wonder if something has changed since William Jennings Bryan or Roosevelt or even Reagan asked the electorate to ignore the received wisdom of eggheads in favor of their own instincts.

We live in an increasingly complex age. Instead of enhancing public discourse, the spread of information often overwhelms our ability to process new ideas. A few weeks ago, Freddie argued that the inherent complexity of the Afghanistan debate demonstrates the fallacy of empire-building in an egalitarian, democratic society, as the electorate simply isn’t equipped to parse the merits of occupation vs. withdrawal or counter-insurgency vs. counter-terrorism. His criticism is telling, but isn’t it equally true of just about every domestic policy dispute out there? If the electorate can’t handle the debate over Afghanistan, are voters really prepared to assess the likelihood of catastrophic global warming or the desirability of the health care public option?

I cringe whenever Mark Steyn or some other conservative bomb thrower takes the “Climategate” scandal as evidence of a world government conspiracy aimed at eradicating freedom. But I’m almost sympathetic to their credulous fans, who haven’t mastered the intricacies of climatology but do know there’s something awfully fishy about those leaked emails. The enduring popularity of the “death panels” myth is also symptomatic of reasonably informed voters who haven’t the time or inclination to read the latest think tank study grappling with an incredibly complex health care debate.

The divide between voters and policy-makers has been explored elsewhere and is probably an inevitable consequence of politics in any egalitarian democracy. But as society becomes more complex, so does policy-making, and the gulf between the electorate’s intuition and sophisticated expert analysis continues to grow. Perhaps the most significant example of this divide is the now-infamous bank bailout, which remains incredibly unpopular despite its near-unanimous support among political and financial elites.

Linker seems largely unconcerned by all this, and indeed is more worried by the prospect of “common sense” infecting a political platform than any disconnect between appeals to populism and actual policy. That voters should be reasonably well-equipped to make informed judgments, however, strikes me as pretty integral to the health of our democracy. In some cases, we may be able to avoid the problem of deliberation altogether (we could withdraw from Afghanistan, for example). Other circumstances make a clash between common sense and expert opinion almost inevitable. In the midst of a systemic economic crisis, we didn’t have the luxury of plugging our ears and ignoring the debate over the bank bailout. And with other, equally complex challenges looming on the horizon (health care, entitlement reform, climate change), the problem of democratic deliberation seems more pressing, not less.

If I had a solution to this dilemma, I probably wouldn’t be writing overlong blog posts. But I will offer one modest suggestion: In the wake of “Climategate” and a bank bailout dominated by financial insiders, the integrity and transparency of expert deliberation is more important than ever. On many issues, I am more than willing to defer to informed opinion. The pettiness revealed in the leaked climate emails and the borderline dishonesty of Bernanke and Paulsen in the midst of the economic crisis, however, makes it more difficult than ever to trust our governing institutions. I don’t want to rely solely on “common sense,” but given the choice, I’ll take my own intuitions over self-interested insiderism any day.

Remember that big chart Al Gore used in his documentary?  If not, here it is:

This chart shows the correlation of high global temperatures and high CO2 levels (though some have argued that if you look closely, you’ll see that temperature actually rises before CO2 levels rise, but we’ll leave that for another day.)  More interesting to me is the presentation of the data itself, and particularly the x axis which includes the present year all the way back to 650,000 years ago.

Now, compared to the life of a human being, 650,000 years is a long time.  In fact, modern humans have only been on earth for about 200,000 years, so not even a third of that chart includes human life. [Read more →]

For everyone who’s ever said that Facebook ain’t good for nothing: you are refuted thusly.

I wanted to briefly respond to a few points inspired by Sonny Bunch’s defense of the death penalty from last week. First, Andrew Sullivan suggests I have “mixed feelings” about executing prisoners. Well, not really. I may not have been very clear in my original post, but for the record, I oppose state-sanctioned execution. In an abstract sense, I suppose I don’t have any moral qualms about killing criminals, but abstract concessions mean very little in the context of a legal system that seems woefully incapable of overcoming human bias.

I very much doubt that technology will ever solve this problem, either. If anything, Radley Balko’s series on Mississippi’s fraudulent forensic investigators suggests that technology has made juries and judges more amenable to pseudo-scientific claptrap, not less. Science is also unlikely to replace or diminish the emotionally-charged circumstances surrounding capital punishment trials.

In a follow-up post, Bunch argues:

Will doesn’t say it this way, but you often hear the argument that life imprisonment is worse than execution because the criminal has to suffer in prison and then he dies anyway. But if life imprisonment is just as awful — nay, worse — than execution, why should we be happy that supposedly innocent people have been stuck in prison with no hope of parole for the rest of their lives? And how many of these innocents will manage to prove their innocence without the neverending legal process that has freed the innocent from death row?

I’m not sure if life imprisonment is worse than execution. The death penalty, however, is irrevocable. Setting an innocent man free isn’t a perfect solution, but it is better than offering our belated condolences to his family after he is wrongfully executed.

Imprisonment also allows us to address many procedural questions after defendants have been tried and found guilty. The finality of execution, on the other hand, means that every procedural concern must be addressed before punishment is carried out. As I’ve argued elsewhere, I think this detracts from any deterrent effect derived from capital punishment. And because of the system’s inherent fallibility, we still risk executing innocent defendants.

UPDATE: Here’s an excellent op-ed on the death penalty from McClatchy.

I don’t care how good they say Windows 7 is, this is still the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen.  Ever. [Read more →]