Worthwhile Reading & Viewing

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Artificial Intelligence and the limits of language.   Is it possible to truly understand statements represented in language without knowing something about the world outside of language?

The abolition of school discipline…basically, the public school equivalent of shutting down police departments.   The article at the link discusses the consequences.

How did Amazon Web Services become so successful?   The track record of companies that developed information technology for their own use and then decided to market it to other users has not been very good:   AWS is a major exception.

Can capitalism save Hollywood?

The nature of America’s university administrators, as observed by Stephen Hsu.   More here.

The mother of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a major figure in the German anti-Nazi resistance, refused to send her children to public schools:

She was openly distrustful of the German public schools and their Prussian educational methods. She subscribed to the maxim that Germans had their backs broken twice, once at school and once in the military, she wasn’t about to entrust her children to the care of others less sensitive than she during their earliest years.

Analysis of trends in scientific publications suggests that truly disruptive research is becoming less common.   The article at the link argues that ideological capture of institutions has been a major cause of reduced innovation.   See also this related article.

Joseph Flaherty reacts to a small carving of a water bird, created 33000 years ago:   “Imagine your greatest of grandparents, pursued by frost and ravenous megafauna through an endless German winter, huddled in a lean-to lit and warmed by an open fire, deciding to carve this bird to make their child smile, to impress their mate, or simply for the joy of creation.”


A Trivial Diversion – The Right Royal Ruckus

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Although ruckus is perhaps too mild a term for the flaming dumpster fire, train wreck or thirty-car pile-up on the interstate, for the public relations disaster that has been called down upon the Windsor family by the present king’s younger son. One isn’t so much drawn to look, in horror just that one can’t look away from the international spectacle of a man napalming relationships with his own family, all egged on by his wife and the news/entertainment media.

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Paul Ehrlich, Still Catastrophizing

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Here’s Paul Ehrlich, best known for his book The Population Bomb, in a 1970 interview.

Why is this surfacing, 50+ years later?   Because just the other day,   60 Minutes chose to put him on the air for more catastrophizing.    Ehrlich’s dismal track record for accuracy of   predictions–Alex Epstein called him ‘the anti-human ecologist who has been 180 degrees wrong for 55 years”–was apparently no problem in the eyes of those responsible for this program.

Here are a few of Ehrlich’s assertions from back in 1968-1970:

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over.   In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death”

“In 10 years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.”

“I will take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000”

“You oughta make the FCC see to it that large families are always treated in a negative light on television”

(and if that isn’t enough, “the government will simply tell you how many children you can have and throw you in jail if you have too many”)

“Enjoy what little time you have left.   That point for me is 1972.”

Perhaps worst and most revealing:    Allowing women to have as many babies as they wanted is akin to letting everyone “throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.”

And how did Ehrlich respond when his most recent media appearance was critiqued?   Like this:

60 Minutes extinction story has brought the usual right-wing out in force. If I’m always wrong so is science, since my work is always peer-reviewed, including the POPULATION BOMB and I’ve gotten virtually every scientific honor. Sure I’ve made some mistakes, but no basic ones.

To which Mary Madigan retorted:

Here, Paul Ehrlich gives us the most comprehensive condemnation of the peer review system ever made.

 

 

Random Pic

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Covid and Credibility

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So it is fairly certain that Damar Hamlin took a hit to his chest at just the right time, angle and force to inflict sudden cardiac arrest. The correct term for this relatively rare occurrence is “commotio cordis”, although a fair number of comments to various news stories comments from the public at large and experienced professionals alike initially wondered if it was the result of a vaccination for Covid, since there seem to have been many incidents in the last few years of fit young athlete-types suddenly dropping from heart attacks during practice, games, or just going about daily life. Neo at Neo-Neocon attributes this to a wide-spread misunderstanding or misreading of statistics, arguing that sudden cardiac arrests in young and relatively young healthy athletes are happening about as frequently as they have pre-Covid it’s just that we are paying attention and noticing such anomalies.
Perhaps; perhaps not. Perception, reality, anecdote, or data. The unsettling thing about this is that our trust in the accuracy of news and social media reports, of the studies of so-called medical experts and our elected officials and bureaucrats has been so degraded of late that it’s honestly hard to be certain of much, other than what was once considered to disinformation, or a conspiracy theory is now turning out to have been true after all. After so many exaggerations, reversals and outright fraud over the Covid epidemic it would be almost impossible for most people to accept any authoritative conclusions about the dangers posed by the Covid vaccines and boosters. What to credit in a climate of doubt and distrust, save that which we have either directly experienced first-hand, or those whom we trust have experienced and reported?

The trouble is that we never had or were permitted to have had a free and fair public discussion about Covid, and those methods and means of effectively countering the epidemic, starting from the jump. Was Covid really that dangerous? The example of the Diamond Princess seemed to indicate that no not that dangerous to healthy young adults or even older adults without pre-existing health issues. But the national and international news media, well aware that panic, disaster, and potentially massive casualties draw eyeballs and interest went all-out in scaring the general public out of their ever-loving minds. And then it was off to the races the most threatening pandemic in living memory! OMG, they were dropping dead in the streets of Chinese cities! Shades of the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic! Mass graves! Overwhelmed hospitals! Packed morgues, full of the dead! We must do something our phoney-baloney jobs are at stake! Harrumph, harrumph, harrumph!

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