I am still mulling over my Grand Theory of Everything. Very slowly but it is still there.
Anyway given recent political events and beliefs driving those events, that brought my thinking back to humans and their love for certainty, AND the vehemence people maintain their certainty. Following a link to another link I found this article .
That science can fail, however, shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. It's a human construct, after all. And if we simply accepted that science often works imperfectly, we'd be better off. We'd stop considering science a collection of immutable facts. We'd stop assuming every single study has definitive answers that should be trumpeted in over-the-top headlines. Instead, we'd start to appreciate science for what it is: a long and grinding process carried out by fallible humans, involving false starts, dead ends, and, along the way, incorrect and unimportant studies that only grope at the truth, slowly and incrementally.
Acknowledging that fact is the first step toward making science work better for us all.
And the point is people in general think their views have the certainty of established sience, but actually established science isn't all that "established"
https://www.vox.com/2015/5/13/8591837/how-science-is-broken
Showing posts with label Remember. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Remember. Show all posts
1/14/2021
12/31/2019
I just want to remember this...
"We’ll have an economy based on wind. I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it better than anybody. I know it’s very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly — very few made here, almost none. But they’re manufactured tremendous — if you’re into this — tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint — fumes are spewing into the air. Right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything — right? So they make these things and then they put them up." - Donald Trump , December 2019
Carzy Trump Rant
There is a bunch of wacky stuff this guy says but this must be at the top of the crazy pile
I assume a trump supporter would would ignore the incoherence and try and distract with Solyndra or imply I hate birds, but keep the eye on the prize, this one is crazy
And to answer his question, yes, I know we have a world.
Carzy Trump Rant
There is a bunch of wacky stuff this guy says but this must be at the top of the crazy pile
I assume a trump supporter would would ignore the incoherence and try and distract with Solyndra or imply I hate birds, but keep the eye on the prize, this one is crazy
And to answer his question, yes, I know we have a world.
12/20/2016
Truth and Power
The point of modern propaganda isn’t
only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical
thinking, to annihilate truth.
– Garry Kasparov, Russian dissident and former world chess champion
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule
is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for
whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of
experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the
standards of thought) no longer exist.
12/01/2015
All The News That's UN-fit To Print
From Matt Taibbi
It's our fault. We in the media have spent decades turning the news into a consumer business that's basically indistinguishable from selling cheeseburgers or video games. You want bigger margins, you just cram the product full of more fat and sugar and violence and wait for your obese, over-stimulated customer to come waddling forth.
...
When you make the news into this kind of consumer business, pretty soon audiences lose the ability to distinguish between what they think they're doing, informing themselves, and what they're actually doing, shopping.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/america-is-too-dumb-for-tv-news-20151125
It's our fault. We in the media have spent decades turning the news into a consumer business that's basically indistinguishable from selling cheeseburgers or video games. You want bigger margins, you just cram the product full of more fat and sugar and violence and wait for your obese, over-stimulated customer to come waddling forth.
...
When you make the news into this kind of consumer business, pretty soon audiences lose the ability to distinguish between what they think they're doing, informing themselves, and what they're actually doing, shopping.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/america-is-too-dumb-for-tv-news-20151125
11/19/2015
Putting the "IS" in ISIS
I just wanted to bookmark this site which critiques the Atlantic article about What Isis Really Wants.
Interpretation. Every useful insight Wood has about end-times prophecy or the Caliphate is compatible with the more common scholarly view that ISIS’s version of Islam is one interpretation among many. One writer who strikes that balance well is Hussein Ibish. As he said in an interview:
Neither is ISIS authentically Islamic, nor is it in any meaningful sense not Islamic. It is a bizarre interpretation of Islam yoked to a political agenda which is very modern. If we just stop fretting about the relationship of ISIS to the religious base of its ideology and accept that it’s a bunch of extremists who come out of a tradition that they manipulate to justify their crimes and their ambitions, it’s not so complicated.
http://weeklysift.com/2015/02/23/the-islamic-state-separating-insight-from-stereotype/
Personal Bookmark
My Personal Bookmark of another thing to remember
"In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind — and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing."
"There was, however, one small incident of my boyhood days which touched this matter, and it must have meant a good deal to me or it would not have stayed in my memory, clear and sharp, vivid and shadowless, all these slow-drifting years. We had a little slave boy whom we had hired from some one, there in Hannibal. He was from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and had been brought away from his family and his friends, half way across the American continent, and sold. He was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps. All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing — it was maddening, devastating, unendurable. At last, one day, I lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said Sandy had been singing for an hour without a single break, and I couldn’t stand it, and wouldn’t she please shut him up. The tears came into her eyes, and her lip trembled, and she said something like this— “Poor thing, when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it. If you were older, you would understand me; then that friendless child’s noise would make you glad.” It was a simple speech, and made up of small words, but it went home, and Sandy’s noise was not a trouble to me any more. She never used large words, but she had a natural gift for making small ones do effective work. She lived to reach the neighborhood of ninety years, and was capable with her tongue to the last — especially when a meanness or an injustice roused her spirit."
-The Autobiography of Mark Twain
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/24/mark-twain-on-slavery-empathy-compassion/
"In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind — and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing."
"There was, however, one small incident of my boyhood days which touched this matter, and it must have meant a good deal to me or it would not have stayed in my memory, clear and sharp, vivid and shadowless, all these slow-drifting years. We had a little slave boy whom we had hired from some one, there in Hannibal. He was from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and had been brought away from his family and his friends, half way across the American continent, and sold. He was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps. All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing — it was maddening, devastating, unendurable. At last, one day, I lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said Sandy had been singing for an hour without a single break, and I couldn’t stand it, and wouldn’t she please shut him up. The tears came into her eyes, and her lip trembled, and she said something like this— “Poor thing, when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it. If you were older, you would understand me; then that friendless child’s noise would make you glad.” It was a simple speech, and made up of small words, but it went home, and Sandy’s noise was not a trouble to me any more. She never used large words, but she had a natural gift for making small ones do effective work. She lived to reach the neighborhood of ninety years, and was capable with her tongue to the last — especially when a meanness or an injustice roused her spirit."
-The Autobiography of Mark Twain
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/24/mark-twain-on-slavery-empathy-compassion/
8/13/2015
Remember this...
Note to self:
Parker Palmer observed in his magnificent commencement address that
“violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.”
Parker Palmer observed in his magnificent commencement address that
“violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.”
7/31/2015
Brain Power
I started reading "Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change " which lead me to "Emotional Brain" where a reviewer on amazon listed these as similar and good books
1. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, by Antonio Damasio
2. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, by Steven Pinker
3. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, by V. S. Ramachandran, Sandra Blakeslee
4. Nature's Mind: The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language, and Intelligence, by Michael Gazzaniga
5. How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligences, Then & Now, by William H. Calvin
I just wanted to remember these titles
1. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, by Antonio Damasio
2. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, by Steven Pinker
3. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, by V. S. Ramachandran, Sandra Blakeslee
4. Nature's Mind: The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language, and Intelligence, by Michael Gazzaniga
5. How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligences, Then & Now, by William H. Calvin
I just wanted to remember these titles
7/03/2015
The Non-voting World
from Tomorrow's Song by Gary Snyder
The USA slowly lost its mandate
in the middle and later twentieth century
it never gave the mountains and rivers,
trees and animals,
a vote.
all the people turned away from it
myths die; even continents are impermanent
.....
The USA slowly lost its mandate
in the middle and later twentieth century
it never gave the mountains and rivers,
trees and animals,
a vote.
all the people turned away from it
myths die; even continents are impermanent
.....
5/16/2015
It's 4 AM, what's on your mind?
I woke up at 4:00 AM this morning and
starting thinking.
Accept these suppositions.
All structures or organizations,
whether political, economic, religious, social, are man made and
somewhat arbitrary. It is only because of the vagaries of cultural
streams and accidental occurrences that cause them to the coalesce
and form as the mass of humanity moves through time and space.
Kind of like the cartoon view of Chaos
theory, where random events, or purposeful events with unintended
consequences, affect a million other events. And suddenly we have a
world with terrorists, crazy politicians, self righteous billionaires
on TV yelling about how paying people below a working wage is better
for them that being able to pay their bills. Something like that.
Beyond noticing how self serving, self
deceptive and hypocritical politicians and billionaires are, the
supposition implies all that could change. But probably these
cultural streams will simply move in a different direction and we
humans will be carried along in the torrent frantically grasping for
floating debris to keep us afloat.
That is what I think of when I wake up
at 4:00 AM. And the is pretty much the first thing that came to mind.
Now that I read this, there may be a reason I could never go back to
sleep.
---------------------------------------------
Afterthought,
This is not to say there may not be realities that come to bear on these man made constructions. Much like the idea of Mathematics as a human invention, as is revealed at certain crucial points (e.g. in why -1 x -1 = 1) , BUT if it did not work in the physical world of engineering we would not be using it nearly as much. And I guess that is were the arguments might start...but unfortunately the world of of human structures is much more open to interpretation of what "works" as compared to engineering. 7:00 AM
---------------------------------------------
Afterthought,
This is not to say there may not be realities that come to bear on these man made constructions. Much like the idea of Mathematics as a human invention, as is revealed at certain crucial points (e.g. in why -1 x -1 = 1) , BUT if it did not work in the physical world of engineering we would not be using it nearly as much. And I guess that is were the arguments might start...but unfortunately the world of of human structures is much more open to interpretation of what "works" as compared to engineering. 7:00 AM
5/10/2014
Things People Ignore #1
Just so I have this reference
At a pivotal meeting of the highest officials in the Reagan Administration [on June 25, 1984], the President and Vice President [George H.W. Bush] and their top aides discuss how to sustain the Contra war in the face of mounting Congressional opposition. The discussion focuses on asking third countries to fund and maintain the effort, circumventing Congressional power to curtail the CIA's paramilitary operations. In a remarkable passage, Secretary of State George P. Shultz warns the president that White House adviser James Baker has said that "if we go out and try to get money from third countries, it is an impeachable offense." But Vice President George Bush argues the contrary: "How can anyone object to the US encouraging third parties to provide help to the anti-Sandinistas…? The only problem that might come up is if the United States were to promise to give these third parties something in return so that some people could interpret this as some kind of exchange." Later, Bush participated in arranging a quid pro quo deal with Honduras in which the U.S. did provide substantial overt and covert aid to the Honduran military in return for Honduran support of the Contra war effort.
The Iran arms-for-hostage-deal was also illegal--or so Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger thought. At a December 7, 1985 White House meeting, Weinberger argued the Iran missile deal was wrong and criminal, according to his notes of the session. Weinberger pointed out to Reagan that selling missiles to Iran would violate a U.S. embargo on arms sales to Iran and that even the president of the United States could not break this law. Nor, Weinberger added, would it be legal to use Israel as a cutout, as was under consideration. Both Secretary of State George Shultz and White House chief of staff Donald Regan, who were each present, agreed that a secret weapons deal with Iran would be against the law. Reagan, though, insisted on proceeding, noting he could answer a charge of illegality but not the charge that he had "passed up a chance to free hostages." Weinberger then quipped, "Visiting hours are Thursdays"--meaning the deal could land someone in jail. After the meeting, Regan told Weinberger he would try to talk Reagan out of the deal. He failed to do so.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/156284/irancontra-20-years-later-and-what-it-means#
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB210/index.htm
At a pivotal meeting of the highest officials in the Reagan Administration [on June 25, 1984], the President and Vice President [George H.W. Bush] and their top aides discuss how to sustain the Contra war in the face of mounting Congressional opposition. The discussion focuses on asking third countries to fund and maintain the effort, circumventing Congressional power to curtail the CIA's paramilitary operations. In a remarkable passage, Secretary of State George P. Shultz warns the president that White House adviser James Baker has said that "if we go out and try to get money from third countries, it is an impeachable offense." But Vice President George Bush argues the contrary: "How can anyone object to the US encouraging third parties to provide help to the anti-Sandinistas…? The only problem that might come up is if the United States were to promise to give these third parties something in return so that some people could interpret this as some kind of exchange." Later, Bush participated in arranging a quid pro quo deal with Honduras in which the U.S. did provide substantial overt and covert aid to the Honduran military in return for Honduran support of the Contra war effort.
The Iran arms-for-hostage-deal was also illegal--or so Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger thought. At a December 7, 1985 White House meeting, Weinberger argued the Iran missile deal was wrong and criminal, according to his notes of the session. Weinberger pointed out to Reagan that selling missiles to Iran would violate a U.S. embargo on arms sales to Iran and that even the president of the United States could not break this law. Nor, Weinberger added, would it be legal to use Israel as a cutout, as was under consideration. Both Secretary of State George Shultz and White House chief of staff Donald Regan, who were each present, agreed that a secret weapons deal with Iran would be against the law. Reagan, though, insisted on proceeding, noting he could answer a charge of illegality but not the charge that he had "passed up a chance to free hostages." Weinberger then quipped, "Visiting hours are Thursdays"--meaning the deal could land someone in jail. After the meeting, Regan told Weinberger he would try to talk Reagan out of the deal. He failed to do so.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/156284/irancontra-20-years-later-and-what-it-means#
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB210/index.htm
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