CapitalistImperialistPig

Every once in a while, I look at some of Arun's great pictures like these and say, hey, I'd like to be able to do that. Aside from the small matter of skill, I expect that it would require a better camera than my current set of point and shoots. So, if I were considering a step up to an entry level DSLR, what should I get? How about micro four thirds and EVIL? Wait for EVILs to come down in price?

It seems that Andres Martinez wrote a Time Magazine article with title as above that triggered an anti-American rant from Bee. What especially offends her about us is our attitude, I think, though for specifics she cites newspapers, roads, plumbing, windows, food, and oh yeah attitude. Not sure that we have a monopoly on that last. OK, so the post provoked a bit of patriotic defensive ire, reminded me of a couple of unpleasant encounhters with Germans and Germany (they were very much the exception, btw), and got me thinking about centuries. It wouldn't be crazy to call the twentieth century an American century, but it is surely way too early to hand that title to us in this one. I suspect that Bee makes too much of the independence of modern German popular culture. The Americans may be a minority on the charts, but even the German and Belgian are singing a mainly American genre. Bee writes a blog in English for cripes sake. I don't think we are moving to a global Amer...

So often when I read libertarians, I often get the feeling that something missing. So it is with this from Robin Hanson via Alex Tabbarok. “Tolerance” is a feel-good buzzword in our society, but I fear people have forgotten what it means. Many folks are proud of their “tolerance” for gays, working women, Tibetan monks in cute orange outfits, or blacks sitting at the front of the bus. But what they really mean is that they consider such things to be completely appropriate parts of their society, and are not bothered by them in the slightest. That, however, isn’t “tolerance.” “Tolerance” is where you tolerate things that actually bother you. Well, he has come up with a definition that fits the case he wants to make - that he is more tolerant than you - but I think it lacks both justification in the traditional use of language and cogency as an argument. The usual dictionary definitions of tolerance actually de-emphasizes the notion that tolerance has to be of things you hate. By that...

There is a concept in philosophy called “epistemic closure” The fundamental notion is that if one knows something, one also knows those things logically implied by that something. This idea looks pretty silly to anyone who has ever studied mathematics, but that’s not my subject here. Every once in a while, some semi-technical phrase or idea gets hijacked by popular culture, usually utterly changing its meaning in the process. Such was the case with “begs the question” a few years back, “quantum leap” way back when, and thus it is with “epistemic closure” today. It seems that one Julian Sanchez wrote a piece about the 'epistemic closure' of the conservative mind. What he was referring to was what a painfully objective observer might call conservative’s close-mindedness or their resistance to testing their ideas against empirical evidence – I would just call it “obdurate stupidity.” Now it seems to me that this usage is almost unrelated to “epistemic closure” in the classica...

Stephen Hawking thinks that alien extraterrestials are out there and that humans shouldn't try to contact them. Human History is pretty definitive on the consequences of encounter between technologically unequal culture, humans seem certain to be far behind any extraterrestial culture they encounter. Hawking is worried that the planet might be taken over by aliens who had trashed their own planet or just wanted more room. “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the native Americans,” Hawking said on his show. I think that I can reassure Hawking on both those counts, though. Most advanced civilizations in the Galaxy have learned to live within their means, and no longer require the intermediation of an Earthlike planet to extract negative entropy from the Universe. Frankly though, you do scare the hell out of us. It's the combination of rapacity and skill in harnessing techology to it that's both...

Tyler Cowen started a minor internet firestorm when he posted this excerpt from a forthcoming (potential?) book by Caplan. Bryan Caplan's cloning confession I confess that I take anti-cloning arguments personally. Not only do they insult the identical twin sons I already have; they insult a son I hope I live to meet. Yes, I wish to clone myself and raise the baby as my son. Seriously. I want to experience the sublime bond I'm sure we'd share. I'm confident that he'd be delighted, too, because I would love to be raised by me. I'm not pushing others to clone themselves. I'm not asking anyone else to pay for my dream. I just want government to leave me and the cloning business alone. Is that too much to ask? This confession didn't exactly arouse a chorus of adulation. "Icky" and "creepy" were common reactions. Others noted soberly that his expectation of "a sublime" bond with a person he imagined would be himself we...

Trust is a pretty fundamental element in the construction of a society. Levels of mutual trust are very highly correlated with economic progress - lack of mutual trust is a poison that cripples economic activity. It also seems that trust is modulated by one basic hormone: oxytocin. Oxytocin is a critical homone in cervical dialation (for birth), the let-down reflex (lactation), pair bonding, and orgasm, and if they spray it up your nose you are likely to give away your money to a stranger who asks. Trust in government is at an all-time low right now, and NPR decided to do some stories on the phenomenon. Government isn't the only institution that isn't trusted - distrust is rather general, suggesting a widespread oxytocin shortage - I mean that distrust is contagious. The NPR story today focussed on the biological underpinnings, but even when we aren't engaged in one of the activities listed in the previous paragraph, our oxytocin levels are equisitely modulated by ou...