North Western Winds

Some good advice from an Orthodox website.

When your “gettin’ it done”, don’t forget family.

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Religion, Catholicism, Christianity

Another reason - as if you needed another reason - to avoid Microsoft products.

Microsoft patents the mother of all adware systems. 

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Tech, Windows, Microsoft

Here are two articles I read today; I found both to really interesting. The first is a New Yorker article about an economist who thinks democracy leads to bad policy when it works properly. Why? People are uninformed and irrational. They choose based on prejudice rather than current theory. They tend to choose to tax and spend and regulate.

Fractured Franchise: Books: The New Yorker:

[Bryan] Caplan rejects the assumption that voters pay no attention to politics and have no real views. He thinks that voters do have views, and that they are, basically, prejudices. He calls these views “irrational,” because, once they are translated into policy, they make everyone worse off. People not only hold irrational views, he thinks; they like their irrational views. In the language of economics, they have “demand for irrationality” curves: they will give up y amount of wealth in order to consume x amount of irrationality. Since voting carries no cost, people are free to be as irrational as they like. They can ignore the consequences, just as the herdsman can ignore the consequences of putting one more cow on the public pasture. “Voting is not a slight variation on shopping,” as Caplan puts it. “Shoppers have incentives to be rational. Voters do not.”

Caplan suspects that voters cherish irrational views on many issues, but he discusses only views relevant to economic policy. The average person, he says, has four biases about economics—four main areas in which he or she differs from the economic expert. The typical noneconomist does not understand or appreciate the way markets work (and thus favors regulation and is suspicious of the profit motive), dislikes foreigners (and thus tends to be protectionist), equates prosperity with employment rather than with production (and thus overvalues the preservation of existing jobs), and usually thinks that economic conditions are getting worse (and thus favors government intervention in the economy). Economists know that these positions are irrational, because the average person actually benefits from market competition, which provides the best product at the lowest price; from free trade with other countries, which (for American consumers) usually lowers the cost of labor and thus the price of goods; and from technological change, which redistributes labor from less productive to more productive enterprises.

The economic biases of the non-economist form a secular world view that people cling to dogmatically, the way they once clung to their religious faith, Caplan thinks.

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ABC News: God vs. Science: Most Scientists Are Nonbelievers

An interesting story at ABC on a study about scientists and religiosity.

The question Elaine Howard Ecklund most wanted to answer was pretty basic: Does the study of science drive a person away from religion? It does not, she said in an interview.

Nearly all the scientists who said they believe in God, and have a current affiliation with a church, were raised in a home where religion was considered very important, she said. Thus, they conform to the same pattern seen in the population at large. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.

Most of the scientists who believe in God have children, she said. And the 3,000 pages of transcribed interviews tell her something else.

“In my interviews, some scientists reclaimed the religion of their youth when they had children, and people in the general public do that as well,” she said

I’d wager that a lot of the ones who were ambivalent about religion were raised that way too.

Ecklund is convinced that her research shows that whether a scientist believes in God is determined primarily during childhood, and most of the scientists she studied came from homes where religion was not considered important. Her study, published in the current issue of the journal Social Problems, puts it this way:

“These data reveal that at least some part of the difference in religiosity between scientists and the general population is likely due simply to religious upbringing rather than scientific training or institutional pressure to be irreligious.”

Aha.

That is likely to be hotly debated in the years ahead, and there is a hint in her own research that suggests otherwise. The disciplines she studied include physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, economics, political science and psychology. Physicists did not lead the list of nonbelievers, which may be a bit surprising given the historic battles between the church and Galileo and Copernicus. Of all those surveyed, biologists were least likely to be religious, the study shows.

The antagonism of biologists to religion is true to my experience - in reading popular scientific works as well as debating on the web. The question is why? I think the popular view of Darwinism as the ultimate stick with which to bash religion makes it attractive to people who are curious about the world and detached from religion. Then there is the “problem of pain”, which is considered to be among the most serious problems anyone with a benevolent view of God is said to face. I don’t personally find it to be the toughest nut to crack; you either grasp suffering as being potentially redemptive or you don’t. For good or ill, my problem has always been divine hiddenness.

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Religion, Catholicism, Christianity, Social science, Education, Science

Terry Eagleton reviews a new book on Mikhail Bakhtin:

Bakhtin’s central concept of dialogism does not mean bending a courteous ear to others, as some of his more liberal commentators seem to imagine. It means that every word or utterance is refracted through a host of other, perhaps antagonistic idioms, through which alone its meaning can be grasped.

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Excellent Commencement speech at Stanford this year.

Gioia to graduates: ‘Trade easy pleasures for more complex and challenging ones’:

There is an experiment I’d love to conduct. I’d like to survey a cross-section of Americans and ask them how many active NBA players, Major League Baseball players, and American Idol finalists they can name.

Then I’d ask them how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, architects, classical musicians, conductors, and composers they can name.

I’d even like to ask how many living American scientists or social thinkers they can name.

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The American Left’s Silly Victim Complex:

This Adbuster’s critique of the American left today had lots to say that I find to be just as true of the left in Canada.

Pique quote:

The American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility.
…

The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following anyone on the American left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and personnel. No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it’s the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn’t mind being in the position it’s in – politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class.

And we all know it. The question is, when will we finally admit it?

And now, the money quote:

A liberal wielding power is always going to seem a bit strange because a liberal always imagines himself in an intrepid fight against power, not holding it. I therefore prefer the word “progressive,” which describes in a neutral way a set of political values without having these class or aesthetic connotations. To me a progressive is not fighting Mom and Dad, Nixon, Bush or really any people at all, but things – political corruption, commercialism, pollution, etc. It doesn’t have that same Marxian us-versus-them connotation that liberalism still has, sometimes ridiculously. It’s about goals, not people.

Awww, shucks. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi started out so well too. The comments are downright hilarious, if you’ve got time to kill. I have sympathy for his criticism and also think he’s highlighted a real solution - stop thinking of yourself as the ragged outsider. It’s delusional. There’s no reason a group like this - tops in education and earnings - is on the outs unless it is because it simply cannot broaden its appeal by way of outreach. Charity starts at home, so listen up. I’m far less impressed with the name change, and really don’t think it adds anything at all. The real use of the term ‘progressive’ is for those in the liberal camp to use in talking with one another. Using it outside the camp gets you nothing but splintering and therefore, weakness.

I remain as Tory as I ever was, so my suggestions here are really intended to strengthen the process by way of seeking a better exchange between the parties involved.

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Social science, Conservatism, Politics

There is no doubt in my mind that this is true.

There are a number of good quotes by Francois de la Rochefoucauld on The Quotations Page. Here are three that I like; I could easily add to the list.

No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.

The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it.

To establish oneself in the world, one has to do all one can to appear established.

If you stop by, you might find that you recognize some of these.

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Quotes

A pretty concise summary of the problem with trying to extract a set of morals from Darwinian theories:

The statement “The environment selects some beetles to eat their young” serves a function in biology similar to the function the statement “Nature is fallen” serves in theology. Both have explanatory power, but the biological statement tries to be descriptive, whereas the theological statement is clearly normative. Christianity teaches that nature is not what it God intended it to be, and thus nature alone cannot be a guide to moral behavior. Without that normative claim, however, Darwinian philosophers are left with an environment that selects any kind of behavior as long as it gives a species a competitive advantage. If we do not eat our young when resources are scarce, it is only because nature has selected other strategies for our survival. It follows that morality must be either a heroic but ultimately fruitless struggle against our nature or a rationalization and mystification of self-interested behavior.

More on the subject of ethics and biology at the WSJ.