It takes time to see who the economic fool is

There’s lots of noise when it comes to listening to people make economic forecasts. One person adamantly says good things are going to happen. Another is a prophet of doom. What I’m thinking is that there’s no “spend our way out of the bad times Obama magic,” but it’s a complicated world. Things can go bad fast, or it can take a long time for things to go bad.

Here’s Larry Kudlow, a syndicated columnist, as opposed to a obscure nobody like me, not that I’ve ever heard of Larry, but Larry’s predicting some propsperity in The Yield Curve Is Signaling Bigger Growth:

The yield curve may be the best single forecasting predictor there is. When it was inverted or flat for most of 2006, 2007 and the early part of 2008, it correctly predicted big trouble ahead. Right now, it is forecasting a much stronger economy in 2010 than most people think possible.

So there could be a mini boom next year, with real gross domestic product growing at 4 to 5 percent, perhaps with a 6 percent quarter in there someplace. And the unemployment rate is likely to come down, perhaps moving into the 8 percent zone from today’s 10 percent.

and

But really, pessimists have missed the big rise in corporate profits, the resiliency of our mostly free-market capitalist economy and the monetarist experiment from the easy-money Fed. The optimal policy mix on the supply-side is low tax rates and King Dollar. We don’t have that. So as good as 2010 may be, with investors moving to beat the tax man, it could be a false prosperity at the expense of 2011.

At least he’s saying that some payback could come in 2011, but anyone who would call our economy a “mostly free-market capitalist economy,” when billions of dollars in the last year have been used by the government to prop up businesses to keep them from failing (after all, failure is an important part of real capitalism), by talking like that, Larry’s pretty much engaging in Obama speak. I guess a lot of media establishment players need to do that to make a paycheck.

But who’s gonna remember what people say about this or that? Maybe I’ll remember what Larry said, for what it’s worth.

I’m an observer. What I know is that, in the long run,  certain core principles can’t be violated without bad consequences.  In the short term, I don’t know what’s gonna go down, and the short term could be 5 years or so.

Larry, in his article, is talking about corporate profits being good, but just a couple of days ago, I was reading, or hearing, that those profits were cooked up.

I was hearing things like that on King World News, from Jim Sinclair or from some of the others.

We’re in the middle of a big experiment. We’re in uncharted territory with the massive amount of debt and spending that’s going on. I don’t know what the future holds, but Obama types think that group synergy can make up for grossly violating the simple concept that, in the long run, you can’t spend more than what you produce.

We’ll find out whether we can, whether magic money can save the day.

Simpletons want to be simple; simplistic platitudes disregarding a complex world; examining information in relation to the adversarial needs of producers and consumers of information; hypocrites at the middle who trumpet to their followers what they don’t follow

The hypocrite, whose followers are forever enamored with the hypocrite’s platitudes, and who only makes information he produces freely available when it’s advantageous to him, especially the information that generates income for him, as opposed to that which he produces as a hobby, writes again one of his favorite platitudes:

Information wants to be free. And this information desperately needed to be freed.

Information doesn’t want anything. Information is inanimate, and it couldn’t care less whether you live or die. (More below about how the hypocrite simpleton can’t differentiate between the many types of information in the world. No, they all want to be free.)

People want information to be free, although that’s only true if you understand it to mean, “People, when consumers of information, want information to be free.”

Information of value, like anything that costs money to produce, can only be properly understood in the context of producers and consumers, buyers and sellers. And when it comes to producers of information and consumers of information, there’s an adversarial relationship, like with any product that costs money to produce.

Any person is a simpleton who ignores that valuable information can cost hundreds of thousands, millions, or billions of dollars to produce. Any person who acknowledges that valuable information can cost hundreds of thousands, millions, or billions of dollars to produce will acknowledge that a producer has a legitimate right to sell information, and needs a profit motive to be willing to produce information that’s going to cost hundreds of thousands, millions, or billions of dollars to produce.

If we’re going to say what inanimate information wants, we would also say, “Information wants money.” Why? Because information for a niche market that’s going to take massive amounts of time to produce will generally cost a lot of money. Saying that information wants to be free is like saying “houses want to be free.”

Now a person, like Karl Marx, who has trouble associating monetary value to the abstract, like entrepreneurship in Marx’s case, can’t understand why information shouldn’t be given away once it’s produced, considering that electronic information costs “nothing” to distribute.

My latest pursuit of trying to find a better producer of information has been switching from Maple to Mathematica. There is the free product Sage, but in a niche market, non-commercial products aren’t usually the best product, or not even close, though they can be the best, and many commercial products can be subpar or useless, which is where the value of try-before-you-buy comes in.

When everybody needs something, like an operating system, then sometimes you can get a product like Linux; that is, you can sometimes get a product like Linux in a mature form, if you’re lucky, about 5, 10, to 15 years after the commercial products have been on the market.

Anyway, the simpleton can’t differentiate between emails and other documents that expose scheming related to a very important public issue, and software and books that cost a lot of money to produce, which has been his main application of  “information wants to be free.”

Would we want to say this? “Personal banking information wants to free.”

As far as what I’m willing to pay for information, primarily books,  preferably in electronic form, since I want to carry my library with me wherever I go, or pay for information that produces information, namely software, I’m a consumer of information, so I prefer to get what I can for free.

However, I would be an ignorant simpleton if I said that information wants to be free. Some people want to give away information, many quality producers of information don’t, they want to sell their information. It’s a complex world, but the hypocrite simpleton and his even simpler followers prefer to live by platitudes rather than seek to use insight and wisdom.

The Nancy Pelosi Response of Type “Are you serious? Are you serious? Because I Don’t Have the Technical Knowledge to be Able to Respond to Your Challenge,” A Derivative Being the Woit-Type of Type “That Doesn’t Deserve A Response Either, Probably Because I Haven’t Thought About the Technical Logic Underneath Popper’s Falsifiable Any More Than Pelosi Has Thought About the Technical Details of the Constitution”

The link: When Asked Where the Constitution Authorizes Congress to Order Americans To Buy Health Insurance, Pelosi Says: ‘Are You Serious?’ (cnsnews.com)

A quote:

CNSNews.com asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday where the Constitution authorized Congress to order Americans to buy health insurance–a mandate included in both the House and Senate versions of the health care bill–Pelosi dismissed the question by saying: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

I’ve decided this could be called “The Nancy Pelosi Response of Type Are you serious? Are you serious? Because I Don’t Have the Technical Knowledge to be Able to Respond to Your Challenge,” or simply, The Nancy Pelosi Are You Serious Because of a Lack of Technical Knowledge Response, or simpler, The Nancy Pelosi Are You Serious Response, or simpler still, The Pelosi Response.

It’s not hard to imagine that when the reporter queried Pelosi about Constitutional authority, her mind became a blank slate, due to any serious awareness of Constitutional authority being nonexistence in her mind, at that time, in the past, and probably in the future.

The main reason for this post is to document the source of the Nancy Pelosi Are you Serious Response, but I want to kill two birds at one time.

Another person who engages in a type of The Pelosi Response is Peter Woit, and he uses this type of response when dealing with challenges to falsifiable.

I link now to his latest blog post, A Brilliant Darkness, even though this is clearly off topic. However, it is related to him and to a larger class of people, the Woit-type, a type who haven’t technically evaluated  Popper’s falsifiable any more than Nancy Pelosi has evaluated the Constitution for Constitutional authority.

Currently, I try to read very few blogs, because the web messes me up. But I do read Woit’s, and you can call me a fan of his blog because it contains lots of good information. The idea “What is science?” is of great interest to me, and his blog is heavily related to that idea. As far Woit, he’s a flaming liberal, but I suppose because he stays away from the discussion of politics, it makes his blog tolerable to me for the one blog I do read.

But back to the Nancy Pelosi Response, and how Peter Woit as an example of why it’s advantageous for people like him and Pelosi to use The Nancy Pelosi Are You Serious Response.

It’s advantageous for two reasons: To give a serious,  technical response to a technical challenge from someone that’s lower on the pecking order, that can lower your status in the eyes of observers who value status more than precept, or who would will have no ability to evaluate the technical argument on merit.

The second reason, which is more probable in many cases, is that the Pelosi-type or Woit-type have thought so little about the in-depth technical details of the challenge at hand, primarily because a particular establishment line has been infrequently challenged, that when the technical challenge is made, their mind is blank, or it’s so apparent to them that they’ve been busted, that they know there’s no legitimate argument against the challenge.

Now in Woit’s case, I’m down on the pecking order, but even when challenged by someone of his status about falsifiable, namely Lubos Motl before he quit his job at Harvard as a physics professor, I’ve seen Woit respond with a derivative of The Nancy Pelosi Are You Serious Response. I can’t find the post I’m thinking about, but all responses by Woit about falsifiable have always been void of any ability to do any kind of tutoring on falsifiable.

Of course, I think Crazy Lubos was probably full of it, and Woit probably expects falsifiable to be in a person’s repertoire of knowledge, and Lubos wasn’t challenging falsifiable on the technical flaws in the logic of falsifiable, or challenging the nonsensical use of falsifiable; he wasn’t doing anything non-standard.

However, I’m making a non-standard challenge. Popper’s problem-of-induction is a technical argument, and the logic behind it is very well-defined.

With Woit-types, though, I don’t think it’s clear to them what the underlying logic of Popper’s falsifiable is. Your average person doesn’t spend much time or any time learning proof logic, and even if they have learned the basics of proof logic, they usually have gone on to more practical things in life. So that’s why it makes sense that for years and years Popper’s falsifiable has been accepted by everyone, everyone at the highest levels in the science establishment. Probably 95% of scientists couldn’t tell you what the truth table of an implication is.

So when challenged about falsifiable, they’re going to respond with a Nancy Pelosi Are You Serious Response. Don’t you think?

I suppose it wouldn’t matter if Popper’s falsifiable didn’t lead to “science can’t prove anything true, it can only prove something false.” Justification for challenging that is all in the details, and for me to convince you that I’m right, you’d need to be able to answer a few questions:

1. What is inductive logic?
2. What is deductive logic?
3. What is the problem of induction?
4. What is a universal quantifier and its negation?
5. What is an existential quantifier and its negation?
6. What does it mean to go from the singular to the universal?
7. What is an implication?
8. What is the negation of an implication?
9. What does it mean to put some of the above together with symbols like ?

It’s first-year college logic. That’s what makes it ridiculous that scientists with Ph.D.s have bought into Popper’s falsifiable all these years. Or maybe it’s not ridiculous, seeing that, like I said, most scientists couldn’t tell you what the truth table of an implication is.

At the very least, it really ridiculous when people use falsifiable with no awareness that an inseparable part of Popper’s falsifiable is the two quantifiers.

Woit-types again demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of Popperian falsifiable, where I ignore the Popperian illusion that falsifying universal statements can establish science on a deductive rather than inductive foundation, for the negation of a universal quantifier is an existential quantifier, and Popper’s very objection to universal claims being based on the existential, on inductive evidence, means that the use of any existential quantifier in a science claim makes that claim inductive rather than deductive; in summary, a claim with a universal quantifier, after negated, contains an existential quantifier, therefore the negation of the statement is inductive and not deductive as Popper says, you can’t have it both ways; using experiment as a basis for a logic claim can never result in anything but inductive logic, even when falsifying a universal, but, again, I ignore Popper’s illusion for the moment

In On the Defensive, Peter Woit links to a Woit-type physicist who makes some comments about string theory. Not caring much about the string theory debate, I found a post by the Woit-type where his language, in my opinion, implies he has a typical misunderstanding of Popperian falsifiable, where Popperian falsifiable, as opposed to watered-down falsifiable, is the only falsifiable that makes any sense.

First, for those not willing to judge my arguments on merit,  in Lee Smolin’s book, The Trouble with Physics, he mentions that Popper’s ideas about falsifiable are contested by some people. Two books I found as a result of Smolin’s book are Fashionable Nonsense and The Rationality of Science.

I haven’t read the two books I mention. I’m merely analyzing people’s statements about falsifiable using Popper’s problem-of-induction thesis, the basics of which are summarized in about the first 20 pages of his book. It’s Popper’s problem-of-induction thesis, clearly stated on page four, which makes it easy to tell when a person has no real sense of the meaning of Popperian falsifiable. That’s because the induction problem is 100% related to the use of the universal and existential quantifiers, the existential quantifier being the negation of the universal.

As I see it, the two main abuses of falsifiable by most people are 1) “in principle,” and 2) the divorcing of falsifiable from the universal and existential quantifiers.

With “in principle,” one of Peter Woit’s favorite ideas, I suppose the logic underlying falsifiable can still make sense. It’s just that if all you have is an “in principle” experiment that hasn’t yet been conducted, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s just plain ole religion; it’s religion when people make an “in principle” claim to be  more than mere conjecture, when they use “in principle” to justify giving the science label to a claim.

With the second problem, when falsifiable is divorced from the context of  “for every” and “there exists,” which are the universal and existential quantifiers of logic, then falsifiable becomes total nonsense.

For examples of such nonsense, we can look to the debate over evolution,  and that brings us back to the physicist.

In Creationist Refutes Darwin’s Evolutionary Theory – A Rebuttal, the physicist uses the word “falsify” in relation to evolution, and I assume, because of the way he uses it, that it’s a “falsifiable falsify.” He (or she) writes,

I mentioned about this talk about a week ago of a creationist attempting to falsify Darwin’s theory of evolution. This morning, I found this response written by a physics major junior that easily threw a lot of doubt in the garbage that was spewed at that talk.

And because he also says,

This is why I’m very proud of this young writer who already has the skill (hopefully something he gained from his education) to analyze and question how such conclusions are made.

and validates this statement by the young writer,

Science is not done this way. If the data does not match your hypothesis, your hypothesis is incorrect.

If anything, the model shows that evolutionist hypotheses are accurate because of the long time period.

then I believe I’m safe in saying that this physicist has a typical nonsensical understanding of falsifiable, and that this is another example that falsifiable, because it makes no sense in its watered down version, has primarily become a useful tool for one person to try and intimidate another.

After all, those physicists are really smart people, and if what they’re saying makes no sense to us, then it must be that we don’t have the educational foundation to understand what they’re saying. And because we don’t want to play the “science denier fool,” we accept them at their word, don’t we?

Unless we happen to have a better understanding of logic than they do, in which case we start to chip away at their nonsense. After all, physicists aren’t logicians are they? And the study of proof based mathematics requires the use of logic more than the study of physics, doesn’t it?

Yes, it does. Much more, which begs the question of why Peter Woit hangs onto falsifiable after spending years working and teaching in the Columbia math department. That old saying rings so true, that you can dress up a physicist to look like a mathematician, by changing his pocket protector, but a physicist is still a physicist.

For the lack of time, from here I state some pertinent ideas.

Because “for every” and “there exists” are inherently tied into falsifiable, falsifiable only makes sense when we have a science claim that is not being contested, and that has been experimentally verified at least once. After that, the goal is to falsify the old theory with a new refined theory.

If a claim has not been experimentally verified by means of observation in the present, then falsifiable doesn’t apply.

According to Popper, falsification is not the same as falsifiable. As I understand it, falsifiable is a philosophy of science. Falsification is not.

Any past event which has been observed to have happened cannot be falsified. This is why falsifiable makes no sense as used by evolutionists. If something such as monkey-to-man evolution is such a sure fire thing, then it can’t be falsified. If it’s so sure that people deserve to be ridiculed as science-deniers for challenging monkey-to-man evolution, then surely it consists of verified past events, and it’s not just a theory.

And this where the contradiction of evolutionists come in. When it comes to falsifiable, they act as if evolution has to be treated as “all or nothing.” If evolution (monkey-to-man type) has been shown to have happened, then a sensible statement to apply falsifiable to would be something like, “For every species, that species came into being by evolution.”

If it was shown that some species came into being through creation, that would not falsify any past occurrence of some species coming into being through evolution. If evolutionists are open to the idea of evolution being falsified, and they treat evolution as an all or nothing theory, then it’s obvious to me that the evolution we’re debating hasn’t been observed to have happened.

The emphasis of falsifiable is falsifying “for every,” not falsifying “there exists.” Falsifying a “there exists” would result in showing “for every” is true, and experiment can never get you “for every.”

Concerning “in principle,” I was being led astray by the word “prediction.” The two ideas “new theory” and “new prediction” gave me the impression that a person would also need a new experiment. And if a person needs a new experiment, then how could falsifiable apply if the experiment has never been conducted?

Again, why would a person be trying to experimentally falsify “for every” if they’ve never experimentally shown “there exists.” However, it finally occurred to me that old experimental data could be used for a new theory and a new prediction.

Some of what I’ve said is my own ideas about what falsifiable is or isn’t, not what I read Popper said it is. I’m primarily working off of his problem-of-induction thesis. If he changed the game on me further in the book, that’s on him. The thesis rules.

The socialism-lite of George Wharletto Bush made Republican Gigolo Texas Governor Rick Perry lethargic, only the hard-core socialism of Boot Licker of the Masses Barack Obama is able to energize Rick Perry

The link: Perry says Obama taking U.S. toward socialism (statesman.com)

A quote:

Gov. Rick Perry had some pretty strong comments about the Obama administration on Wednesday in Midland, saying, “This is an administration hell-bent on taking America towards a socialist country.”

Everything is bigger in Texas. We had the biggest political gigolo, George Wharletto Bush, while it lasted. Rick Perry wants to outdo him.

Rick Perry couldn’t make the connection between socialism and George’s No Child Left Behind on the Conveyor Belt of the Stupid Kid Machine, where, in the immortal words of Zapata King,  “you put a smart kid in and get a stupid kid coming out the other end.”

Rick Perry couldn’t make the connection between John McCain’s sweet socialist promises during his presidential campaign, McCain’s attempt to try and make sure that Americans knew that Republicans could also promise Government to the Rescue Every Time All the Time.

But I can make those types of connections. That’s because I’m an extraordinarily intelligent person who can analyze actions apart from labels. I’m so smart that I started comparing Democrats to European socialists years ago, so incredibly intelligent that I began labeling Democrats as socialists in 1989. So stupendously brilliant that I read in a book that Karl Marx didn’t distinguish between socialism and communism, now that’s impressive.

Not a dumb guy at all, because I noticed the “socialist” in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and guffawed when the Obama supporter at work said that one of the first things the Russian communists did was to begin to arrest the socialists, a statement which could be considered representative of the near total absence of the word “socialism” in American politics prior to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, a statement representative of the near total absence of education in the United States, now and especially in the past, about what socialism is.

Rick Perry, however, is now making an issue of socialism. He could have worked to try and educate people in the past about what socialism is, but to have done so would have caused many people to realize that Republicans have been involved in implementing socialist policies for many years.

Politician first, general second, Army chief of staff General Casey with weak knees propagandizing about the bad religion of Slam

The link: Army Chief Concerned for Muslim Troops

A quote:

Asked whether he thought the Army “dropped the ball” in not responding to warning signs that the major was increasingly radical, General Casey replied that he was encouraging soldiers to provide information to criminal investigators. But he added that the Army needs to be careful not to jump to conclusions based on early tidbits of information.

“The speculation could heighten the backlash,” he said on “This Week.” “What happened at Fort Hood is a tragedy and I believe it would be a greater tragedy if diversity became a casualty here.”

I do think that the supreme leader of the military should make sure that Muslim citizens under his watch aren’t physically harmed or harassed.

But advocating mindless diversity is pure propaganda and brainwashing. Now, as far as how a leader should protect Muslim citizens, but not make Slam out to be harmless and good, that’s his problem. I’m not a government official, so I don’t have the problem of being tempted to cower down in fear of losing my powerful government position. I only have the problem of  being tempted to cower down in fear of losing my lowly position in life or of not being able to gain some other lowly position.

The fact is, bad religion should be opposed. It’s no fun opposing it, and opposing bad religion has the potential of putting you in uncomfortable situations with people, or worse if you’re in the minority, but it’s downright crazy to wimp out and make Slam out as benign.

I’m not currently working with any Muslims that I know of, but working with a Muslim wouldn’t be a problem with me. I hired a Pakistani engineering student using odesk.com to help me get disciplined and get up in the morning, and I assume he’s Muslim; I’ve never asked him whether he is or isn’t. As it turned out, he wasn’t disciplined either, but he’s still in my Skype contacts, and occasionally he’ll instant message me, or me him.

Society doesn’t have a problem with people not tolerating the KKK any more, but according to politicians such as General Casey, Slam is a good thing.

It’s not, though, and I know it’s not because I understand that the Koran is bad religion, and I can look around the world and see that Muslims take the Koran serious. They act on it. In particular, they act on the parts that tell them to subdue the unbeliever, and that’s why Slam is a such a threat. It’s not a threat because every Muslim acts on those parts of the Koran. It’s a threat because enough of them do. It’s no coincidence that Islamic republics like Pakistan and Iran are 99% Muslim.

Technically speaking, I consider all religions but one bad religion, but from a global perspective, you’re not going to hear me complaining like this about any other religion but Slam. That’s because there’s bad religion, and then there’s bad kill-you-dead religion.

I can coexist peacefully with adherents of a religion whose book doesn’t tell them to kill me. I can coexist peacefully with a small minority whose book tells them to kill me for blaspheming their god, but to facilitate the growth of that minority into a majority, that’s just crazy, especially when I can look around the world and see what happens when they’re something other than a very small minority of the population.

Slam is a global threat comparable to communism of old. But when communism was in full bloom, it wasn’t any different. There were a whole lot of people saying, “Who are we to condemn what they choose?”

Tom Cruise, he loves all the Scientology suckers of the world

The St. Petersburg Times does a big expose on Scientology here.

People have been chipping away for years at Scientology, and it’s finally getting to the point where Scientology can’t go after their critics as effectively as they could in years past.

Their cash cow, the exclusive access to the writings of L. Ron Hubbard, are threatened now by the Internet (breitbart.com):

Others think the Church of Scientology is in trouble. Along with the defections and French court setback, Scientology has been unable to stop Internet leaks of confidential material that members must pay a premium for, said Hugh Urban, a professor in the department of comparative studies at Ohio State University.

I don’t see Tom Cruise falling away. Some people like a servile attitude in other people, and all those Suckers for Scientology who work in poverty for Scientology, including those who serve celebrities at the Scientology celebrity center, those kind of people are flattery heaven for people like Tom.

The Afghan war, and when Afghans have a will of their own

The link: U.S. official resigns over Afghan war (washingtonpost.com)

A quote:

Hoh was assigned to research the response to a question asked by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during an April visit. Mullen wanted to know why the U.S. military had been operating for years in the Korengal Valley, an isolated spot near Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan where a number of Americans had been killed. Hoh concluded that there was no good reason. The people of Korengal didn’t want them; the insurgency appeared to have arrived in strength only after the Americans did, and the battle between the two forces had achieved only a bloody stalemate.

Korengal and other areas, he said, taught him “how localized the insurgency was. I didn’t realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometers away.” Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases.

“That’s really what kind of shook me,” he said. “I thought it was more nationalistic. But it’s localism. I would call it valley-ism.”

…

With “multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups,” he wrote, the insurgency “is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and Nato presence in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified.”

I think Hoh is forgetting why we went to war in Afghanistan to begin with. The original motive to attack them didn’t come from a desire to help them out and free them from the Taliban; it came because Osama bin Laden had been using Afghanistan as an operating base to attack us.

But we can go back to George W. Bush and his positive think and positive speak, how he was going to take democracy to the world, and defeat the enemy completely.

If you understand that some people in the world don’t want to or aren’t willing to live like us, and if some of those people become our enemy, and if the people in their region, many of them their friends or family, don’t want to or don’t have the will to ally themselves with us to defeat our enemies, then you understand that it’s best not to build up unrealistic expectations. If you confess up to reality, then you might be able to come up with a realistic solution.

Positive think and positive speak are important and good if you’re building on reality. Otherwise, they’re no good.

And here is John McCain talking about winning: McCain: Why we can — and must — win the war in Afghanistan (cnn.com)

McCain says,

Success in Afghanistan will emerge, as it did in Iraq, when local leaders and citizens are more and more able to take responsibility for governing and securing their own sovereign country without substantial international assistance.

Of course, I’m no expert, but it seems to me that Afghanistan and Iraq are not good comparisons, since Afghanistan is much more rural and mountainous.

And I think McCain is overstating “success” in Iraq. The whole reason the U.S. had to have a surge is because it lost control after initially having Iraq under complete control. The loss of control was due to Bush and Rumsfield’s refusal to take heed of military advisers who told them that they needed about 300,000 ground troops after the invasion, so I read.

Only God knows the future, but it seems to me that McCain is being very presumptuous in not allowing for the possibility that 28,000,000 people don’t want or aren’t willing to comply with what he thinks is best. Or that 100,000 foreigners can succeed in imposing liberty on 28,000,000 people who haven’t been willing to fight for freedom or live free in the past, to be willing to break the yoke of bad religion, to fight their own tyrants much.

Observationally-sacrificed science by consensus, Peter Woit and Sean Carroll as archetypes, those willing to operate past some observationless threshold, which is why resistance from Woit-types can do no more than lead a horse to a different watering hole

In Nielsen-Ninomiya and the arXiv, archetype Peter Woit is waging war against all those crackpots. Well, not quite. He always shows respect for Sean Carroll.

Not that I’m calling Sean a crackpot. I don’t call anyone a crackpot. I’m thinking about Woit’s inconsistencies. With Woit, with the right credentials and right status, typically of more combined weight than his, you’re safe from the crackpot label. Woit writes,

Because of the New York Times article discussed here, four recent papers by Nielsen and Ninomiya have been getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere. Pretty much all of it has been unremittingly hostile, when not convinced that these papers must be some sort of joke (except for this from Sean Carroll).

I assume Peter plays it safe with labeling people because he places great value on his outsider-insider status. He’s not willing to risk being excommunicated by all the other prophets of the past, thus becoming an outsider-outsider.

To attack the root of the problem, Woit would have to start making the argument that non-speculative science requires a fairly strict form of observation. But that would be arguing that evolution (the unobserved type, as opposed to the fruit-fly-to-fruit-fly type) would have to be relegated to speculative science, the big bang also. I can’t see that Columbia would want him around if he did that, even in the math department. Most mathematicians of the assertive and vocal type are just as fanatical about evolution as establishment scientists.

Actually, I’m probably giving Peter too much credit. As a prophet of the past, it’ probably not that he’s afraid to lose his status and position, even if he’s financially secure enough to do so, and he has said that he’s financially secure, it’s probably that he’s more like them than not like them.

And that’s why Woit types will never win. All they can to is shift the problem. Types like him seem to have succeeded in damaging the status of string theory, but I would guess the result is that instead of graduate students becoming string theorists, many of them become, say, cosmologists. The fatal flaw with string theory is that there’s the expectation of present or future experiment to verify claims. [If there's any substance to string theory, it's only fatal for a person who wants the fame and glory now.] If your claims deal with the past, there are no such expectations. Logic is sufficient, because obviously, events in the long past cannot be observed.

Woit will never win against operators like Sean Carrol. For one thing, given that all scientists can use a standard set of assumptions that have never been observed to have happened, Sean’s argument is superior to Woit’s. In the article linked to above, Sean writes,

[There's no] real justification [by Nielsen and Ninomiya for pulling an absolutely speculative idea out of their hats] — or if there is, it’s sufficiently lost in the mists that I can’t discern it from the recent papers. That’s okay; it’s just the traditional hypothesis-testing that has served science well for a few centuries now. Propose an idea, see where it leads, toss it out if it conflicts with the data, build on it if it seems promising. We don’t know all the laws of physics, so there’s no reason to stand pat.

Once you compromise on a foundational idea, it’s a slippery slope.

…the specific choice of action contemplated by NN seems rather contrived. But I’m happy to argue that it’s the good kind of crazy. The authors start with a speculative but well-defined idea, and carry it through to its logical conclusions. That’s what scientists are supposed to do.

And because the observational requirement of Galileo-type science was compromised, compromised  to allow prophets of the past to make their prophecies, and to present those prophecies as science to be able to “explain everything by natural means,” it’s a slippery slope.

Sean writes,

There is another reasonable question, which is whether an essay (not a news story, note) like this in a major media outlet contributes to the erosion of trust in scientists on the part of the general public. …It’s always important to distinguish as clearly as possible between what is crazy-sounding but well-established as true — quantum mechanics, relativity, natural selection — and what is crazy-sounding and speculative, even if it’s respectable speculation — inflation, string theory, exobiology. But if that distinction is made…

The distinction is supposedly made, and among those claims distinguished  as non-speculative science are those that are only logically true, logically based on a hypothesis that certain rates are “well-established” for all time; the theory of relativity confirmed in the present is given no more status than detailed descriptions of the physics driving the cosmos (supposed but not observed) billions of light years away from the Earth, detailed descriptions assuming  a particular rate for all time, and assuming light has always only had one way to get from point A to point B.

But if that distinction is made, I’ve always found it pretty paternalistic and condescending to claim that we should shield the public from speculative science until it’s been established one way or the other.

Sean’s logic is solid, and that’s why the Sean types will succeed as long everyone  is allowed to use an unobserved set of assumptions.

[I'm talking about Sean's overall logic of people being justified in throwing out science claims, and then letting the claims be vetted by everyone else. Really, on saying that Sean's logic is solid about this, I've decided I might be guilty of  "assert yourself like a true blowhard whether you know for sure that you're right." But the standard is not very high these days for claims to earn the label of science, not when "in principle" experiment takes the place of experiment. Getting respect for a claim is more of a process, where the most assertive and aggressive people win respect for their theories. That's the way I see it. ]

If the leading scientists have given us permission to treat certain logic claims as science, it only makes sense that when consensus permits, more will be periodically added to the set. In the current setting, science isn’t clearly delineated knowledge,  it’s a continuum from the first time that a speculative claim is made to when the claim is completely accepted, acceptance not necessarily a result of people having observed what is claimed to be true.

Certain assumptions result in specific logical consequences. If the criteria for distinction between speculative science and science is not near-present experimental observation, always, then logic trumps experiment when actual experiment is impossible or impractical.

Because the observational requirement for science has been compromised, it only makes sense that debate rather than experiment has become a primary means by which people establish their ideas as science.

Any fool can debate. However, it takes combined billions of dollars (euros) from multiple nations to do advanced experiment.

The payback in war of setting false expectations

The link: American troops in Afghanistan losing heart, say army chaplains (timesonline.co.uk).

A quote:

Sergeant Christopher Hughes, 37, from Detroit, has lost six colleagues and survived two roadside bombs. Asked if the mission was worthwhile, he replied: “If I knew exactly what the mission was, probably so, but I don’t.”

In Proverbs, it’s written, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”

As long as military and political leaders refuse to publicly confess that the Afghans must be the ones who decide whether our enemies in Afghanistan can be  overwhelmingly defeated, then we can’t deal with reality.

Where do we think the Taliban came from? From another world? Some country far, far away? They were produced by the families of Afghanistan, and because the Taliban are driven by certain Islamic beliefs, then it must mean that, in general, other non-combatant Afghans share those beliefs, or at least Afghans who are more willing to assert themselves.

If you’re not sure whether you can do more than merely contain and subdue the enemy, because of factors beyond your control, then you shouldn’t act if there’s some guarantee that you can, that it’s just a matter of fighting the good fight, otherwise you’re building up expectations in people that may not be fulfilled.

But in Afghanistan, if we want to maintain a presence in the country, then that implies we may never be more than an occupying force. That’s a big problem for multiple reasons. But by refusing to acknowledge it, it makes it appear that there’s only two options, total victory or total defeat, and it results in propaganda because politicians and leaders make it appear that there are only two options.

With the right mindset, you can endure adversity for the long term. If someone tells you success is going to be easy, and then it’s hard, and hard for a long time, you get discouraged and disillusioned.