A Question for Jonathan – or Anyone Knowledgeable

How honest is the 23rd District of Florida, Jonathan? Bribery & national security aside, I always find percentages like this suspicious:

They first elected him by 59 percent of the vote in 1992 and subsequently have returned him to Congress by margins ranging from 73 percent to 100 percent. He was just re-elected to an eighth term without opposition.

(Not that it is easy to put national security aside.)

Discuss this post at the Chicago Boyz Forum.

Further Mutterings on the More Succinct & Sound Remarks by Jonathan & David

Knowing history is an important part of being educated, not only because it’s good to honor the people who came before us, and who built the world that we take for granted, but also because if we don’t know what people did in the past we will needlessly repeat many of their mistakes. This is as true on an individual level as it is in geopolitics. We forget it at our peril, and too many people have forgotten it. Jonathan

Honoring is thanking, respecting, learning from. This is something that takes us a while to understand. Some find it hard to see Hamlet as a tragic hero – he’s too self-absorbed, too cynical, too indecisive, too – well, too non-heroic. He doesn’t do great deeds, he is more worried about his father’s ghost than he is about the kingdom his father ruled. That diminishes heroism. He’s the adolescent tragic hero. Well, we’ve got plenty of them.

Some day, people may look back on our time as that of “The Adolescent.” (I hope it ended with a new period so harshly entered on 9/11 but I fear it may not.) David Foster’s “temporal bigotry” comes from a lack of sympathy & imagination as well as history. Most of all, it comes from hubris. But it is not an Olympian hubris; rather it is that of a teen-ager in the throes of first love, unsure of his own dignity and self, angered by the demands of classes and work he finds demeaning. He complains the world is not sufficiently accommodating, voices the petty doubts of the village atheist and classroom cynic.

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“Temporal Bigotry”

David Foster reposts a classic post that ties together the Thanksgiving holiday, some thoughts about what people knew in the past and what they know now, and reflections on the state of modern education.

It’s tempting to assume that people know more now than they did in the past. In one sense this assumption is true, since the state of knowledge in many fields advances over time. However, it is not necessarily true for knowledge held by individuals. In the past, many activities, from farming to driving a car to trading shares to doing scientific experiments, required a great deal of specialized knowledge that is no longer necessary. Automobiles, for example, are more complex than they used to be but are also much easier to operate. The automobile designer knows more but the driver needs to know less. This is a good situation because the driver now has more time to spend on activities where he is more productive.

However, “activities where he is more productive” is the crucial point. If many people are not well educated — educated in the sense of understanding and knowing how to do things, not in the sense of formal schooling — they will not be very productive despite the availability of efficient, easy to use, time-saving modern technologies. That is why effective education is so important, and why our intellectually decrepit system of primary and secondary education is a national scandal. It’s also why the hubris of people who think we moderns know better is destructive.

We don’t know better. Human nature hasn’t changed. We know some things that our ancestors did not know. However, the converse is also true, and if we forget it we will keep reinventing the wheel. Knowing history is an important part of being educated, not only because it’s good to honor the people who came before us, and who built the world that we take for granted, but also because if we don’t know what people did in the past we will needlessly repeat many of their mistakes. This is as true on an individual level as it is in geopolitics. We forget it at our peril, and too many people have forgotten it.

Discuss this post on the Chicago Boyz Forum.

Midas Oracle – The New Prediction-Markets Blog

Our friend Chris Masse has made himself into the world’s coordinator of news and information about prediction markets. Now he has set up an excellent group-blog, Midas Oracle, which looks very good so far and strongly displays Chris’s commitment to dispassionate, fact-based inquiry. It promises to be a major forum and resource for people who are interested in prediction markets.

Check out and bookmark Midas Oracle.

(Disclosure: I am a minor contributor to Midas Oracle.)

“. . .producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high. . .”

There’s evidence that asteroid impacts may have occurred much more frequently, and recently, than anyone previously thought. Of course evidence isn’t proof — there may be a better explanation for the apparently-related “chevrons” (huge inland flow-molded sedimentary deposits) and undersea craters, from which proponents of the asteroid-impact hypothesis infer mega-tsunamis — but it might be a good idea to reconsider the odds of asteroid impacts in light of this new information.

And speaking of odds, why is global warming more of a threat than asteroids? I’m not saying it isn’t. I am saying that our public-resource allocation decisions ought to be driven by realistic comparisons of the expected aggregate costs (i.e., the odds that an event will happen or its incidence in the population, multiplied by the cost of the event if it happens) of each class of events. What are the expected aggregate costs of

-Global warming?

-Asteroid impacts?

-Breast cancer?

-Prostate cancer?

-Diabetes?

-AIDS?

-Automobile accidents?

-Gun accidents?

-Nuclear or other WMD attacks?

Not all of the information necessary to make such comparisons is available, but in cases where it isn’t (asteroids, global warming, WMD attacks) we can stipulate wide ranges of odds and possible costs and use these ranges in our comparisons.

Comparing risks in this way might lead to a different set of public priorities than does our current societal practice of responding to the most publicized and dramatic risks.

OTOH, there is little if any incentive for public officials to evaluate relative risks on their merits. The political incentives are all for response to spectacular risks and risks that have organized constituencies.

I suspect that better public education is the only effective remedy for this classic problem of public choice. Citizens are more likely to demand rational allocation of public resources if they better understand science, probability and statistics, and history — IOW, if they have the tools to make more-realistic risk assessments.

(Cross-posted on the Chicago Boyz Forum.)