At this time of year I ask myself what were the biggest stories of the past twelve months in business/financial news. Of course, I choose the ones I do largely because they illustrate an important theme, and in the list below I'll spell out and boldface the theme. Yet the theme itself isn't the story. Here are the twelve stories, by month, that especially caught my attention and that in retrospect I recommend to yours. 1. January. Immigration. Well, of course. But I want to highlight a different aspect of the immigration question than the one that has caught the most attention. In the early days of the new year, Reuters appears to have heard from sources that the President elect (as he then was) was in talks with hi-tech employers about the possible overhaul of the H1B visa system. At the end of the month, word leaks out that the now President, Donald Trump, is moving in the opposite direction from what those employers presumably had hoped . This will...
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Back in 2005 a British climate scientist, James Annan, made a bet for US$10,000 with two Russian physicists who were skeptics about global warming. The Russians, Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtseva, took the position that the years 1998-2003 had been as warm or warmer than the years 2012-2017 would be. The three scientists involved in the bet agreed that win/lose would be determined by temperature data from the US National Climatic Data Center as it was then known. (It has changed its name to the National Centers for Environmental Information.) Now we near the end of the latter of the two periods covered by the bet. The Russians will be the payors. Congrats to Annan, and actually to all three for conducting science according to the Popperian rule. Popper didn't say you actually have to risk money on falsification, but still ... My final comment on this point will be that the outcome of the bet wasn't even remotely close. In the graph above, which was compile...
Yes, I understand that introducing "quantum theory" into a discussion of the foundations of morals is over-done. It has become associated with New Age fishiness. I will go there, regardless. Suppose a certain swindler has stolen money that properly belonged to a worthy charity, and “Made Off” with it. His theft might have rendered the charity helpless to do some good works on which helpless beneficiaries of its attentions had come to rely. This event must be for us (if we are deterministic) something more than a one-time bad event or evil action. It must be a baked-in feature of the universe. The laws of nature demanded mercilessly and without recourse that the swindler had to swindle, the charity had to be rendered impotent, the helpless had to suffer. Without any other ‘could have been’ this tragedy before a part of an irremediable tearfulness of things. If, imbued with healthy animal spirits we seek to escape that pessimism about the whole of t...
The cozy home sat at odds to the primary compass points. The front of the building faced northeast, so its corners (and the corners of each of the rooms) faced off to the various proper compass points. There stood a large television stand in the eastern corner with an even larger (though thin) television stretching out of the edges of both sides of it. One of those "big screen" teevees that really ought to be hanging on a wall but isn't. Two chairs to the right of the television, framing an electric fireplace with a mantle of seasonal decorations. To the right of THAT, on the northern corner, a very plush older Easy Chair with a wooden level on the side to lean it back or stand it up again. What should be the wall on the northwestern side of the room is mostly a doorway to the dining room. The contents of THAT we leave out of account for now. To the right of the wide door, an abstract painting. To the left, the thermostat (actually two thermostats, of different vi...
Some words from Tennyson for my readers, Christian or otherwise (theists or otherwise). Let me preface the verse with a bit of Ivyberry. Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape And Ivyberry, choose; and still depart From death to death through life and life, and find Nearer and ever nearer Him who wrought Not matter, nor the finite-infinite, But this main miracle, that thou art thou, With power on thine own act and on the world.
Wildfires in California. I've been surprised by how 'wacky' (for lack of a better word) have been some of the responses thereto. Of course I shouldn't be surprised. This is the country that elected Donald Trump president. I guess the notion of applying our usual political insanity to wildfires slipped under my radar and came up on me as a surprise. But one finds on twitter without much effort earnest attempts to explain that brush and tress aren't burning, that only houses are burning, because the fires are the consequence of a government plot. Also, one finds efforts to use the fires to make one of the key political points of the Trump coalition: beware illegal immigrants. There is no evidence any illegal immigrant had anything to do with any fire in California, or that there was arson involved with the largest of the fires in the state now, involving an arsonist of any nationality or legal status whatsoever. Regardless, on twitter denizen “Cali-Conser...
There are surely respects in which the notion of “space-time” as a unitary block, the view of time as just one of its dimensions, has served a useful role in the further development of science and technology. Insofar as it does, we might accept it pragmatically as true. But (secondly) broad propositions are often ambiguous, even when not obviously so, and in the case of any ambiguity it is always open to us to say that the statement or the idea is true in one respect, false in another. What might tempt us even at an early blush to suspect that there are respects in which this idea is false? There are the various ambiguities and paradoxes that come with the idea. Consider the bicycle in the doorway as an example. A bicycle stands in an open doorway such that the front of the bike is inside the house, the back of the door is outside. A philosopher asks us, “Well, is the bike in the house or not?” We might well reply, “some parts are, some parts are not.” Simp...
On this day in 1958, the voters of France made Charles de Gaulle the first President of their country's Fifth Republic. Just so I will never regret never having listed them all in one place, here are the five Republics. 1. The First Republic was the creation of the Great Revolution. It was formally established in 1792 by the National Convention and it was overthrown 12 years later when Bonaparte made himself an Emperor. Interlude. That Empire was overthrown, the Bourbon dynasty restored. Then the Bourbon dynasty morphed into a brief Orleanist monarchy, and that in turn gave way, in 1848, to ... 2. The Second Republic was the shortest-lived of the bunch. It was declared by Alphonse de Lamartine, lasting only from 1848 to 1851. Long enough to inspire satirical lithographs by Honore Daumier though, so that's something. Interlude. The Second Republic was replaced by the Second Empire, which in turn would last long enough to be overthrown by Bismarck from without and Com...
So I've bumbled on a discovery. I've discovered that a certain 18 year old book seems to be important to controversies that are in turn important to me. As you can see, I pursued the kind pointer of Richard Heck, mentioned here yesterday. He referenced What's Within? Nativism Reconsidered (1999). The amazon page is here: https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Within-Nativism-Reconsidered-Philosophy/dp/0195159780 This is a contribution to the old debate between rationalism and empiricism. Cowie says that empiricism, with its blank-slate mind filled by experience (or, as behaviorists came to say, by conditioning) was regnant in the Anglo-American world in the late 1940s. This was the era of Skinner's rise to prominence. It was also an era when a lot of ideas seemed to have been discredited by the recent war, by having a Teutonic sound to them, and innate ideation was a casualty. Later, Chomsky and Fodor turned the tide: Chomsky as to language skills, Fodor as to ideas pro...
The philosopher Jerry Fodor passed away on November 29th. Fodor was very influential on the philosophical discussion of psychology and of language. My understanding is that Fodor was very much on Chomsky's side of the notorious Skinner/Chomsky divide, conditioning versus nativism as an explanation of "verbal behavior." On December 3, Richard Heck posted a whimsical blog entry about a philosopher's heaven, in which Fodor is now talking ... "to Hume and Descartes and Darwin -- what a lot they have to figure out! -- and [reuniting] with his old friend Hilary Putnam and his old enemy B.F. Skinner (who's no longer thus)." They all presumably have learned to acknowledge "how little, ultimately, those agreements and disagreements mattered," because it is love that matters. I've taken advantage of Heck's comments section to ask him for further elucidation especially of that issue of nativism and the now-transcended "enmity...
Continuing yesterday's train of thought.... a hiker rounds the top of a hill and sees below him a vista, the one he had made the hike for, one of those that inspired the creation of the word "sublime." If he says anything it is a verbal exhale, something like "ahhhhh," because words fail. He is having a good moment and, assuming he gets home without mishaps, without running afoul of a mountain lion or such, he will call this a good day on the strength of that moment. Of course the moment doesn't last. It is, as we've been saying, evanescent. Its significance as an intrinsic moral good owes something to that evanescence. Soon, practical concerns bound up with that safe trip home we've just postulated will take over and the sublimity will fade. It is worth our while observing the intermixture of permanence with evanescence here. The hill itself is enduring -- it was there before our hiker approached it. It was there before there was a soci...