David Yates finally made a good Harry Potter movie. Necessary and unnecessary liberties were taken, but the result was excellent. That said, why was Harry standing around aimlessly in the crucial scene? No doubt some of these problems can be fixed when the ten hour miniseries version comes out.
It seems there is a new on-line archive where Lumo and friends ought to be able to publish their climate research.
Will Wilkinson might have gotten short changed in the name department, but I doubt if that's why he became a Death Eater. Not quite literally, of course, but I do lump him with Sauron's servants and Morgoth's minions because he is a Cato Institute mouthpiece. The Cato Institute, in case anyone didn't know, is a Right Wing "think" tank funded by some righty billionaires and other evil doers (big tobacco, big oil, big Walmart, etc.) Like it's similarly funded brethren, The AEI, The Marshall Institute, and The Heritage Foundation, it pretends to be an intellectual enterprise but actually produces only propaganda - scholarly looking articles that are rarely published or subjected to peer review - a necessity when what you have to say is less than honest.
Wilkinson, it seems, has written a long article on income inequality in America that got mentioned on two of the sites in my blog list (Andrew Sullivan's and Tyler Cowen's). This article tries to challenge Paul Krugman's various articles complaining about rising income inequality in the US. There are twenty-eight pages of it - many words and few to the point, as a great moral philosopher once said on a different subject.
Recent discussions of economic inequality,
marked by a lack of clarity and care, have confused the public about the meaning and moral significance of rising income inequality. Income statistics paint a misleading picture of real standards of living and real economic inequality. Several strands of evidence about real standards of living suggest a very different picture of the trends in economic inequality. In any case, the dispersion of incomes at any given time has, at best, a tenuous connection to human welfare or social justice. The pattern of incomes is affected by both morally desirable and undesirable mechanisms. When injustice or wrongdoing increases income inequality, the problem is the original malign cause, not the resulting inequality. Many thinkers mistake national populations for “society” and thereby obscure the real story about the effects of trade and immigration on welfare, equality, and justice. There is little evidence that high levels of income inequality lead down a slippery slope to the destruction of democracy and rule by the rich. The unequal political voice of the poor can be addressed only through policies that actually work to fight poverty and improve education. Income inequality is a dangerous distraction from the real problems: poverty, lack of economic opportunity, and systemic injustice.
Thinking Clearly about Economic Inequality
by Will Wilkinson
As his preface suggests, he wants to dispute Krugman's claim of rising income inequality. His problem is that the facts are quite unmistakable. The proportion of the national income going to the top 0.1% and the top 0.01% has increased dramatically in the last 40 years.
He has prepared a multi-layer defense. First, he says, income may not be rising for the bottom 90%, but their consumption is! I guess it's supposed to be some kind of blessing that people with less than $100 k income bought million dollar houses (which are now being foreclosed, of course. People are making less, but they are borrowing more! The fact that he led with such a stupid argument doesn't promise much, and the rest of his arguments don't deliver.
Second, even though the rest of us have less money, the crap we buy at WalMart has gotten cheaper, but the crap the rich find from Hermes hasn't. The point, I guess, is that money differences don't represent real differences - a very odd argument for a free marketer to make, btw.
Third, there may be more inequality, but it doesn't matter, because the Ethiopians have less income inequality than us but we are still better off. There's a big hooray, alright.
Fourth, income inequality is OK even it is harmful it it was achieved "fairly" - whatever that means.
Fifth, if incomes are unequal that's because that's the way Americans like it.
Finally - at least as far as I'm concerned - he claims that:
There is little evidence that high levels of income inequality lead down a slippery slope to the destruction of democracy and
rule by the rich.
This is simply untrue. Even if you disregard the evidence of Greece, Rome, and Florence, there is plenty of domestic evidence of that rule already. He likes to disparage "redistribution" but look to whom the hundreds of billions of dollars of bailout money are being distributed to - the same rich guys who brought about the crash.
Like others in his camp, he likes to pretend that there is a huge leftist army arrayed against the Fox liars and people like him, but those he cites are just more billion dollar corporations - the NYT, National rePublican Radio, etc.
If we really had rule by the rich, he claims, Obama and the Democrats could never have taken power, and he cites all the money Obama was able to raise. This ignores the fact that the same wealthy interests are almost as deeply embedded in the Democratic Party as in the Republicans. It also ignores the fact that it took an enormous cascade of misrule by truly stupid Republicans to arouse enough anger to throw them out.
Go ahead and read it if you have an hour to waste. The true believers are sure to wield it like a bible.
It also includes some pretty stinko writing, e.g.,
.
You can have a distribution of anything you can put a number on. Take height. Andre is 68 inches tall, Beatrice is 70 inches, and Carlos is 80. Let’s say they are members of a club...
WTF? Ok, he's trying to explain what an income distribution is,but this sure looks like non-nutritive fiber to me. There is a lot of it.
I have played computer games for years, but only the intellectual kind - chess, go, or solitaire. Some young people I have known forever recently published a new game called Altitude though, so I tried it. It's a multi-player internet game of aerial combat with some cool game physics, but at first I thought that my aged and untrained reflexes would prove a hopeless handicap - and they did, at first. I have gotten a real kick out of finding out that I really could learn to play it though, and my steady improvement has been a blast.
Shameless plug: you can try it for free. You don't need a game controller, only a keyboard.
Tyler Cowen points us to Sam Knight of the Financial Times writing on high IQs. The featured player is Marilyn vos Savant, owner of the Guinness World Records highest IQ, now and forever, of 228.
Savant – the surname is real, it was her mother’s maiden name – has had a unique claim to fame since the mid-1980s. It was then, almost 30 years after she took a test as a schoolgirl in downtown St Louis, Missouri, that her IQ came to light. In 1985, Guinness World Records accepted that she had answered every question correctly on an adult Stanford-Binet IQ test at the age of just 10, a result that gave her a corresponding mental age of 22 years and 11 months, and an unearthly IQ of 228.
I say now and forever because Guinness has dropped that category.
If we were to try to interpret that IQ in the conventional fashion for adults, at the usual rate of 15 points per standard deviation, that number comes to just about eight and one half standard deviations and a probability of less than 10^(-17) or one in 100 quadrillion. That's not plausible, of course, but as a ten year old she supposedly did as well as the average 23 year old on an IQ test.
In any case, she was obviously a smart kid and has become a very clever and knowlegible adult. The FT article is a winner in my book, touching a number of points that fascinate me: the high IQ societies, the superstitious awe in which society holds IQ, and a few hints of the relationship to achievement (modest but real) - not to mention the good old Monty Hall problem, probably Marilyn's most famous controversy, but one that she did get right.
So what do IQ tests test? One of the beauties of the IQ theory is that once you have convinced yourself that a bunch of skills are correlated, testing almost any of them seems equally plausible. Because correlations are imperfect, most IQ tests present a grab bag, but three key components are pattern recognition, speed and complexity of mental processing.
The Wechsler Adult Inteligence Test is one of the most popular ones. They test four general areas, each of which has sub areas:
Verbal Comprehension Index (VCI)
Perceptual Reasoning Index (PRI)
Working Memory Index (WMI)
Processing Speed Index (PSI)
The well-substantiated claim for IQ tests is that they predicts academic performance. Looking at the individual skills certainly makes that claim seem plausible to me. It's also claimed that it predicts performance in all sorts of other areas. There is little obvious correlation of very high IQ to exceptional intellectual accomplishment, however. Geniuses are smart, but might have IQs only a couple of standard deviations above the norm. Many of the so-called super IQs are extremely modest in accomplishment. vos Savan, for example, was distinctly ordinary until she got the idea of claiming the world's highest IQ - two failed marriages (the first at age 16) and employment in the family business A very high IQ friend once explained to me the reason why he left academia - he found that the thing he was actually good at was taking tests.
A claim is made in the article for what I would call the Sheldon Cooper phenomenon - that very high IQ individuals tend to be socially incompetent and often suffer from Asberger's syndrome.
I was shredding a bunch of old financial records over the weekend. Among them (for some reason) I found a bunch of old calculations for my dissertation. Page after page of gruesome integrals, all of which had to be done by hand in those pre-Maple days - probably not even a good two day's work now, but many weeks (or months) in those ancient days.
Well, that was certainly a waste.
My friend Zephir asks what I find wrong with his physics. Let me give some examples of what I consider good scientific explanations and what I don't like about his.
What makes a good scientific explanation? The cosmos, and particularly the motion of the planets, has provided us with a couple of thousand year’s worth of explanations. Consider three:
(1)Copernicus. His explanation of planetary motion exemplifies some crucial features of a good scientific explanation. (a) It starts with two simple explanatory principles – the Earth and planets move around the Sun and the follow circular paths. It also has another crucial feature that will set the standard for all physics to come: it makes specific, quantitatively testable predictions. This last feature proved that the Copernican theory could not be quite correct and set the stage for
(2)Kepler. Kepler kept heliocentricity, replaced the circular paths with ellipses, and found specific laws relating the rates of motion of a planet along different portions of its path and relating the periods of the orbits to their semi-major axes. Kepler’s magnificent work set the stage for
(3)Newton, who showed that Kepler’s laws, and their counterparts for the newly discovered moons of Jupiter, could be understood as the manifestation of universal gravitation, the same force that makes an apple fall from a tree (and holds galaxies together).
Every one of these explanations embodied the following principles: (a) A clear geometric and quantitative model and (b) quantitative testability. The same principles, by the way, characterize Einstein’s model which refined and superseded that of Newton. When string theory (or some other quantum theory of gravitation) supersedes Einstein, it will be expected to pass the same tests.
Zephir has offered several (to me mutually incoherent) "explanations" of dark matter. http://aetherwavetheory.blogspot.com/2009/07/awt-approach-to-dark-matter.html
Here is one:
But we can use even more illustrative explanation, linked to dispersion of energy by background field of CMB photons formed by gravitational waves (GWs), which manifests like weak deceleration equivalent to product of Hubble constant and speed of light. This dispersion is direct manifestation of hidden dimensions on both large scales, both small scales, because it manifests as a shielding effect of these photons at Casimir force distance scale. We can say, Casimir force is a shielding effect of GWs, whereas the Pioneer anomaly is subtle deceleration effect caused by dispersion by GWs. Both these forces are result in violation of Newton law at small scales, which manifests itself by anomalous deceleration at large scales and as such it violates the equivalence principle of general relativity - it's as easy, as it is.
To me this looks like a word salad of phrases taken from currently popular articles on cosmology and physics. Does anybody have any idea what it means? Where are the principles upon which the explanation is based, and how are they woven into a coherent expanation? They aren't. What about "dark matter" is it trying to explain? And where is there any specific capable of quantitative test? In short, I don't think this "explanation" explains anything, not even what it is that it's trying to explain.
I would consider this an extreme example, but some of the same traits exist in the so-called explanations the evolution doubters.
My wife has been doing a bit of summer cleaning. This time this meant getting rid of several boxes of her books. If we are to contemplate retirement, we need to think about where to put the books we bring home from work. She's not content to give away her books, of course. If she has to suffer, so must I, and so I was ordered to undergo the same ordeal.
I have a lot of books that I started but never finished. This could be due to getting bored, or just hating the book, but usually it's because something else - some other book - distracted me. I do plan to finish them someday, so getting rid of them now just doesn't seem reasonable.
Of course there are a lot of books that I have read. I would get rid of them except that I might want to read them again sometime.
The largest class of books consists of those I haven't read, or have barely started. Mostly these are technical books on subjects that interest me, especially math, physics, astronomy, biology, and economics. It would really be silly to have paid good money for them and give them away before reading them. Never mind the fact that I read such books more and more slowly as I get older, blinder and dumber. And that I already have more of these than I'm likely to read in any plausible lifetime.
Thinning a book collection is hard - maybe there is a good book on it somewhere.
Physics used to be called natural philosophy, but it and other philosophy were divorced sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. Physics got the children, the house, and the bank account but philosophy still had to pay alimony. Philosophers have had a major grudge ever since.
Sean Carroll notes that Steve Hsu found this quote from philosopher Paul Feyerbend.
The withdrawal of philosophy into a "professional" shell of its own has had disastrous consequences. The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrodinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth -- and this is the fault of the very same idea of professionalism which you are now defending.
Lumo adds some mostly insightful commentary including apposite comments by Steve Weinberg. (I say mostly, because he can't resist irrelevant rantings against Peter Woit and Lee Smolin).
Feyerbend's distain for Feynman is vindictive but hardly justified. Feynman was more contemptuous of philosophy than ignorant of it. He just didn't think that it still had anything useful to say about the world. It's probably safe to say that most scientists today would agree that the insights of philosophy are of another day.
There are some modern philosophers with a more humble attitude toward science, of course. If nothing else, some of them, say Daniel Dennett, write some good books explaining aspects of science.
Plato and Aristotle thought that the nature of the world could be apprehended by pure thought. History revised that to say that the work of pure thought could be done by mathematics, but experiments had to settle the facts. This left those philosophers who were neither mathematicians nor physicists out in the cold.
On the other hand, string theorists do seem to be going back to the "pure thought" paradigm, but most of them would still like to see some experiments.
UPDATE: Anyone interested in this subject should read the comments over at Cosmic Variance, especially this detailed and well-informed one by Lee Smolin.
Ther are other good ones too.
