Something For Everybody

Be positive in the new year.

It's Just Made Up

One of the hardest things for many people to grasp about money and governments (and the relations between them) is that it really just is all made up: it's people keeping track of who owes what to whom. Nothing has intrinsic monetary value. It makes for a lot of mistakes in economic planning and fiscal policy. If the government is in debt, it just needs to be credible in saying that someday it will pay itself back and there will be no problems. That's really it.

In the news release announcing his bill to derail the platinum coin effort, Republican Representative Greg Walden says something really stupid: “My wife and I have owned and operated a small business since 1986. When it came time to pay the bills, we couldn’t just mint a coin to create more money out of thin air.

American Socialism

Thoroughly American, but not so socialist.

93.5% Of Human Brains Are Abnormal

You do the math.

Voxel Based Morphometry (VBM) is a way of analyzing brain scans to detect structural differences. It's most commonly used to compare groups of brains to find average differences, but some neuroscientists have started using VBM to check for abnormalities in a single brain. Scarpazza et al list 34 pieces of research about that, including 13 since 2010.

So it would suck if there were a problem with individual VBM... but there is...

The authors took 200 normal brains and compared each one of them in turn to a control group of 16 normal brains. Because all of them were healthy, the comparisons ought to show no significant differences.

The technique was set up so that, in theory, only 5% of the brains should have been wrongly labelled as containing an abnormality. But in fact, a full 93.5% of the normal brains gave at least one false positive.

So 5% is more like the rate of not being wrong. Oops.

One Reason I'm Not Good At The Academic Game

I don't have much confidence in just about any provocative thesis. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the big ones is that I think empirical evidence is important and yet most findings are false. It's hard to get into the mindset of defending something controversial to the death for purely instrumental reasons.

I'm Sympathetic

One dude's view on why not to go to grad school for a literature degree:

But, I told the Should I Go to Grad School? editor, I couldn’t speak about graduate school education in general for two reasons. First, it seems intuitively true that for subjects such as history, philosophy, the hard sciences, and even some of the softer ones, it would be hard for me to make a case against graduate study.

But grad school for literature, I can't advocate. I escaped Yale before it became the center of the frenzied fad for French literary theorists, as a result of which students read more about arcane metaphysics of language, semiotics and the like than the actual literature itself. But, even though many of the most sophisticated contemporary intellectuals who once bought into this sophistry (such as Terry Eagleton) have abandoned it, the tenured relics who imposed this intellectual regime are still there, still espousing their view that literature itself is only to be understood through their diminishing deconstructing lens. I can testify to it, having sat through enough seminars at the Shakespeare Association of America conferences to last a life time. Please don't waste your life this way.

Guns

Republican David Frum has been very good on guns (he's originally from Canada - to most other wealthy countries, our gun policies look absolutely insane, even to conservatives; the same is true on health care). People who want to appeal to the 2nd Amendment have a few problems with interpreting it, but let's grant, just for the sake of argument (I wouldn't grant it otherwise), that the 2nd Amendment grants an individual to own a gun even when not part of a well-regulated militia. Still we are very familiar with contrasting rights. Gun nuts never explain why the 2nd Amendment is a stronger right than all other rights. When other rights present danger to the public, we curb them. One can't yell fire in a crowded movie theater (I gather the jurisprudence on this matter is much more complicated than this, however). Free speech is of course a protected right. Importantly, one can't threaten to harm people with their speech. One has the right to practice one's religion. However, one cannot threaten to kill people, or actually kill them, as part of sacrificial rituals, etc. One has the right to assemble, but one cannot simply assemble anywhere or anytime - that power would conflict with other rights, so we curb it and regulate it.

Clearly, as Frum and many others have pointed out, the presence of guns - one of the most technologically advanced tools ever created - presents a threat to the public in many situations, including, for instance, firefighters fighting a fire. Since we have a conflict of rights, and a very clear track record of guns harming peacefully assembled people in the public, there is an airtight case that guns ought to be regulated, just as free speech, free religion, free assembly, etc. are, even if we assume a misguided reading of the 2nd. The fact that in some cases guns have protected a group is relevant, but these cases are very infrequent and are greatly outweighed by the damage done by guns in far more cases - we are on pace to have more gun deaths than traffic deaths in the U.S. This does not even take into account the alarm and panic caused just by the threat of guns - one's rights are violated if one is threatened with a gun, even if one is not actually physically harmed.

Amazing

Read the whole thing. One of many tasty bits:

O’Sullivan, wearing a pink oxford and Wayfarers perched on the tip of his nose, discussed issues as diverse as modern slavery, Hispanic Catholicism, male prison rape, and the preservation of “the Anglosphere,” which he defined as the former British colonies “who use English as their common means of communication.”

During a discussion of Iran, a tall, jovial foreign-policy columnist named John Thomson was shouted down by everyone at the table for calling Barack Obama “an intelligent man.” “He’s not with us,” whispered a woman named Nancy from Key Biscayne.

I casually mentioned that the phrase “Anglosphere” was perhaps unfortunate given the right’s image problem as a majority white party. O’Sullivan agreed they might need a different word.

“We haven’t done our marketing that well,” conceded Thomson. “That was Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney messaged whiteness. That was one of his greatest failings. ‘I’m a white Anglo-Saxon.’ ”

Melissa O’Sullivan, the Alabaman wife of John, wasn’t buying the idea that Republicans had alienated minorities. “We’ve invited them to join us!” she insisted...

But Ms. O’Sullivan again took umbrage. As everyone went silent, she recalled a conference she attended in Australia in which a liberal nun (who “didn’t even have the decency to wear a habit”) criticized America for its “inner-city racism.” Offended, Ms. O’Sullivan recounted what she wished she’d said to this nun:

“Pardon me, madam, but I have been in your country of Australia for ten days and the only Aborigines I’ve seen have been drunk on the street, and at least if we were in my country they would be serving the drinks at this conference!”

Ms. O’Sullivan then warned against watering down the purity of the conservative agenda to placate minorities or, as she put it, rather succinctly, “the bastardization of the product.”