Some institutions and inventions are great precisely because they make trust irrelevant. Charlie Brown keeps trying to kick the football. Lucy keeps pulling it away. Yet Charlie still has to trust her: he doesn't know how to kick a football without someone holding it, and it seems no candidate for holder presents him/herself except Lucy. But isn't there an obvious solution? There are small plastic kickoff kicking tees. As above. They sell for about $5 each. Doesn't Charlie get enough of an allowance to buy one? Cryptocurrencies exist because no one trusts central banks any longer. "Distributed ledgers:exist and find applications beyond the cryptos because people distrust a lot of other institutions. Covid-19 creates a difficult problem because people mistrust regulatory agencies, the medical profession, the big Pharma companies, etc. The problem may be to work through the distrust, not against it. Use cryptos and the like. Cryptos can handle supply chains for ven...
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Years ago I offered on this blog a close reading of the lyrics of a classic Christmas song. Because I feel lazy, I will just paste that close reading here and perhaps do some minor tinkering on it. ------------------------------------------------------- The news it came out in the First World War The bloody Red Baron was flying once more The Allied Command ignored all of its men And called on Snoopy to do it again The Allied Co mmand has a rather low opinion of its own men. Snoopy's flying-ace fantasy on top of his doghouse was firmly established in the pop-cultural consciousness well before The Royal Guardsmen did this in 1967. But Snoopy always seemed to lose his imagined battles with the Red Baron. He'd go down in flames, shouting "Curse you!" That was the running gag. So how had the Allied Command developed its confidence in his ability to do "it again" -- if "it" means anything they should want done? Apparently, they were confident in his a...
Fascinating stuff. Most social science studies show that opinions on social/political matters have a lot of inertia behind them. Adults don't change their mind quickly and, when a mind does change, it is liable to snap back into the earlier position. But there was one study not long ago that seemed to show that gay marriage is an exception. Now, that study turns out to be a fraud. There's a great story on all this in NEW YORK .