Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The world has too many tempests in too many tea pots, and I don't regret not being able to keep up with all of them. But sometimes when I find that I missed the real-time unfolding of one of the tempests, and the tempest itself seems really bizarre, I do want to revisit, to get a mulligan. So let's look at the Halal soup controversy. This it appears was a big thing in 2010, when I missed it.  Halal in its broadest significance simply means "permissible." Its more specific significance is dietary. It has, for Moslems, much the same ring that "kosher" has for observant Jews.  Apparently Campbell's soup, the nice people who did so much for Andy Warhol, decided in late 2010 that they would test market "halal" food. Perfectly cool right? I mean: in a capitalist system, businesses seek out markets to serve. The only reason to brand any soup cans "halal" is if that caters to a market demand that makes the costs of the branding wo...

How can we use statistics to get at causal impact? Of course, correlation does not imply causation. Remember my lesson from a Dilbert's comic last week. But still, there are inferences to be drawn somehow. It may be a fact that MacDonald's just spent a lot of money on an ad campaign involving firecrackers and tapdancing penguins. It may be, also, that they sold a million hamburgers worldwide yesterday. It does not follow that they sold the million hamburgers because of that ad campaign. What MacDonald's clearly wants is some idea of how many hamburgers they would have sold if they had had some other ad campaign in place, possibly some less expensive campaign. Something involving their familiar clown and his sidekicks. Here's a social sciency thing about "Bayesian structural time-series models" that aims at getting at the problem. It's actually based on the experiences of Google, paid clicks versus free clicks, etc. -- I just prefer the MacDonald...

Random reading.... In the February issue of HARPER'S, Rebecca Solnit works to relate the Second World War to ... every environmental disaster since. The following may be the money quote. "In crucial, material ways, the technological modernization of World War II never ended. Pesticides, nuclear engineering, and plastics -- all developed during the militarization of industrial production -- are now part of a war by other means. All three industries sought profitable postwar applications and found them in agriculture, in energy production, and in the creation of untold disposable plastic items, the ubiquity of which was aided by he rise of advertising and marketing." The reference to pesticides there brought me up short. Are pesticides the consequence of that war in the same  sense as nuclear engineering? Sulfur was used as a pesticide by the Chinese back around 1,000 BC. My understanding is that the modern and highly marketable nature of pesticides dates back to ...