October 2009

The conservative political parties in Australia are in total chaos trying to come up with a response to the Rudd government’s (not very impressive, but better than nothing) proposals for an Emissions Trading Scheme. The fundamental problem is that the majority of them, along with virtually all of the conservative commentariat share the delusional view that the whole body of climate science is a hoax, got up by a coalition of grant-grubbing scientists and environmentalists bent on world domination. But within this majority, a substantial group are sufficiently in touch with reality to realise that 80 per cent of the Australian population disagrees with them, and will hand them a thrashing at the next election.

So, they have a problem. They’ve used their near-majority in the Senate to block the ETS legislation, but now its coming up again. On a second rejection the government can dissolve both houses of Parliament and call an election which would almost certainly produce a crushing defeat. But, for a number of technical reasons, the government doesn’t want to go this way and might just be willing to do a deal. The party leader, Malcolm Turnbull (the most able they have by far, but not known for sound judgement) is desperate to do such a deal and has put his leadership on the line. But the hardline delusionists are, so far, unwilling to go along. All in all, there’s plenty of pain to go around, and the government has been happy to watch the Opposition wallow, arguably at the price of a less effective response to climate change.

There’s a bit of a puzzle to me here. In the US and UK, as in Australia, the conservative commentariat is solidly delusionist. In the US, Republican politicians, activists and voters are similarly deluded, so there is no coherence problem. But in the UK, it seems as if Conservative politicians ought to be facing a difficult choice between going with the majority of their supporters (sane, on this issue at least) and the commentariat (delusional). But as far as I can see, the Conservatives are at least as good as Labor on this issue, yet they don’t seem to cop any flak from the Telegraph, Spectator, Times etc, all of which push a solidly delusionist line. I’d be interested in observations from those closer to the action.

* On top, from an equally valid perspective, but I’ll let the northern hemisphere majority have their comforting conventions on this one.

I finally read Gillian Tett’s Fools Gold, an account of the development of the derivatives industry centered on credit default swaps (CDS) and collateralised deposit obligation (CDOs) that collapsed so spectacularly last year. The discussion is excellent, but still, I think, too charitable to these instruments and their creators. Tett’s main source is the group at JP Morgan who pioneered many of these derivatives and, largely, got out before the crash. Their line, unsurprisingly, is that the problem was not with the concept as they developed, but its abuse by latecomers.

But a close reading of Tett’s account yields a different story. These innovations were defective from day one.

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Well, the European Left still has Portugal, Norway and Greece, but having lost France, Germany and Italy and with Spain and the UK looking decidedly vulnerable, one has to conclude that on balance, European social democracy is not going through one of its purpler periods. The days of Blair/Schroeder/Jospin are over. Why, and what does the future look like?
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I’m an undisciplined note-taker. I like to read a lot, putting post-its or other suitable markers in the pages as I go, and planning with the best of wills to take notes later. (I type very quickly, after all. I should be able to take notes even though I use so many post-its.) But then I just never get around to the sloggy, typing-it-all-in part. Recently I’ve tried to change things up. I sit down with a stack of books full of post-its and scan in just the post-it’ed bits, plucking the fluttering yellow feathers from these literary birds as I go, until I could stuff a whole pillow with used post-its by the time the night is over. I turn all the scans from any given book or article into one PDF, and I use Acrobat’s OCR capacity to make it semi-searchable. I can do something else while I work, like listen to an audiobook or podcast. I find this semi-mindless tidying of the aftermath of my reading mind’s life to be relatively pleasant activity. Now I want to take it to the next level, making the most of all my PDF’s (and docs in other formats, too, of course): does anyone here use, for example, DEVONthink, which some people have told me is good and useful. (But I am suspicious that these people are more obsessive than I about this sort of thing. I’m not a database-devotee by nature. I’m not going to go scripting stuff for DEVONthink. I know I won’t.) DEVONthink seems like a good deal because it has OCR based on ABBYYFineReader. And DEVONthink doesn’t even cost more than FineReader. Acrobat’s OCR, although adequate for basic purposes, is not great, and FineReader is supposed to be pretty good. So even if that was all I used it for …

Tell me of your time-saving note-taking methods, but don’t tell me to type it all in. What are good scanning products and OCR software suites and notetaking software. I’ve been using Zotero and I like it just fine. But maybe DEVONthink is better enough to be worth paying for, especially with the OCR?

I’ve been moving slowly on the book for the last few weeks, but I have taken one positive step to encourage further discussion. In response to suggestions from readers, I’ve started a wiki site imaginatively named Zombiecon where my plan is to post draft chapters. The Efficient Markets Hypothesis is already up. In part, the idea is to provide a reference to avoid some of the problems that arise from blogging a section at a time. But, if someone wants to create one or more talk pages on the site itself, that would be great. I’m not really sure joint editing in the mode of Wikipedia, but if you have suggested minor changes, go ahead and make them – I may revert or partially adopt them.

I’ve just finished “Dirt Music”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0330490265/junius-20 (“UK link”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0330490265/junius-21 ), having read “Breath”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312428391/junius-20 (“UK link”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0330455729/junius-21 ) a few days back. I can’t remember a novelist grabbing me so tightly recently, or giving me such pleasure, or, sometimes, pain. I’ve never been to Australia, never mind Western Australia, I don’t care about surfing and not much about fishing. It really doesn’t matter. Winton is all about life, regret, sensation, grief, commitment, and working out what (and who) matters and what doesn’t. No plot spoilers here. I’m set to read everything else he’s written.

Mercedes Sosa “died today at age 74”:http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/10/04/arts/AP-LT-Argentina-Obit-Mercedes-Sosa.html?_r=2&hp. An amazing voice, wonderful songs, and an important symbol of resistance against the Argentinean dictatorship. She will be missed, not just by Latin-Americans.

Alan Grayson has caught some flak for alleging the Republican health care plan is ‘don’t get sick, and if you do, die quickly.’ For instance, here is push-back from the Corner: “if you must respond, just repeat after Ed Morrissey: “I seem to recall that Republicans wanted to abolish the death tax, and Democrats objected. Which party wants to make money off of your dead corpse?” In other words, technically the plan is, ‘don’t get sick, and if you do, die quickly. And if you manage to do so with more than $1 million, you can give it all to your kids.’ This is a health care reform plan? Repeal the estate tax?

“Glenn Beck ?!!???”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/01/AR2009100103889.html?hpid=opinionsbox1. Truly, these are desperate times for conservative would-be intellectuals (n.b. also the defence of Jonah Goldberg’s _Liberal Fascism_ as a ‘serious work’ that will stand the test of time).

So the polls are open in Ireland for the Lisbon Treaty Mulligan referendum. Early reports suggest that “more people are voting than the last time”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/1002/breaking1.htm in Dublin, but that turnout elsewhere in the country is very low. I’m predicting a win by somewhere in the 6%-8% range (more predicated on ‘No’ voters being discouraged and not voting, than on any great sense of positive enthusiasm for the referendum). Also worth noting in passing that Wolfgang Munchau “who suggested last year”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/07/02/kicking-the-irish-out/ that the Irish could (and perhaps should) be kicked out of the EU for their impertinence in voting No the first time around now seems to “have gone quite cold”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9fb71816-a095-11de-b9ef-00144feabdc0.html?catid=131&SID=google on the Treaty himself. He fails to tell us whether major European member states are monitoring his shifting beliefs against the likelihood that they might soon have to pull out of the EU and reconstitute themselves in a new organization that would specifically exclude Wolfgang Munchau. Perhaps his column next week will reveal more – in the meantime, feel free to speculate about the vote, provide updated information, opinions etc in comments.

Update: Looks as though I seriously underestimated the swing – the Treaty passed by a 17% margin.

From the “Times Higher Education Supplement”:http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=408524&c=2

bq. Fights broke out as law students queued for up to 11 hours last night to secure the dissertation supervisor of their choice at Brunel University. More than 100 students queued outside Brunel Law School overnight in the hope of working with their preferred academic, after the school introduced a first-come, first-served supervisor-allocation system. ….“There are some people you just don’t want. If everybody in the school were a good supervisor, we wouldn’t have to do this. You’ve no idea how distressing it was to see people punching each other in the queue,” said the student.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

I was kind of surprised to see that the wonderful Tom Russell has a long essay on some new blog called The Rumpus, all about Juarez, El Paso, drug wars, borderlands, corruption, et cetera. I love his music, and I like his writing too, so I’m always pleased to see some more of it. The content, though, the content is shocking.

bq. I turned that page in section B where there was a short item about two El Pasoans slain yesterday in a Juarez bar shooting. Back page stuff. Hidden near the end of the story was the astounding body count: _nearly 2900 people, including more than 160 this month alone, have been killed in Juarez since a war between drug traffickers erupted January 2008_ . John Wesley Hardin wouldn’t stand a chance.

Jesus. You’re probably safer in Kandahar.

I don’t see why only Theory and Monday should have all the fun. Still, one comment from Michael’s thread caught my eye. Hidari:

I might also add that the ‘anti-relativist’ or (as I would prefer to put it) ‘anti-contextualist’ position is generally hopelessly confused in that they tend to use Positivist arguments to support Realist positions. But you can’t do that. The positivists were instrumentalists, as befitted their anti-metaphysical, pro-empiricist assumptions. Realism is a metaphysical position.

The rest of the comment suggests this is supposed to express a Nancy Cartwright-style view, which I don’t think is really quite properly described as anti-realist. (It is anti-Realist, for certain values of the self-important capital-R. But that is another kettle of fish. Or, possibly, Fish. I mention this out of scrupulosity because it just isn’t clear to me the positions Hidari is objecting to in the thread are Realist, as opposed to realist.) Anyway, the point is this. I’ve been watching the new They Might Be Giants Here Comes Science DVD with my girls [amazon]. It’s great! Can’t decide yet whether I like it better than the earlier TMBG kid’s discs, but it does measure up so far.

In the opening number, one of the Johns does exactly the thing that bothers Hidari (and Cartwright is indeed someone who scourges this particular move): offering positivist arguments on behalf of realism.

As I was saying, one of the Johns quotes Rudolf Carnap, “science is a system of statements based on direct experience and controlled by experimental verification.” And the other John then says: “Or as we say, Science Is Real!” And the song starts. But these two statements are hardly equivalent. Indeed, even the graphic for the song title is eloquently anti-Carnapian:

This clearly implies that science does not consist of sentences. It is a thing that itself contains the things that sentences about science are about. Or as we say: things! Reality! (Call it what you will. Place is thick with the stuff.)

Here’s a YouTube link to the video for TMBG “Science is Real”, complete with Carnapian intro. (You can also watch it as an Amazon preview, but they cut the Carnap bit! That was the best part!)

So your job, this Reality Thursday, is to write a song – or poem – expressing as clearly as you can, with extra style points for keeping it intelligible to an 8-year old – your favored philosophy of science. Does it consist of sentences, or does it consist of reality? You decide! The only thing I can think of that rhymes with ‘paradigm’ is ‘spare a dime’. As to the rest: I’m recovering from the flu myself and have 100+ papers to grade, so don’t ask me to dance you a little jig. I don’t have the time or energy.

You can also comment in prose.

My friend John Pollock died yesterday. I’ll leave it to others to write up his many contributions to philosophy and computer science. I wanted to take a moment to remember him as the hard-charging mountain biker he was. He introduced me to biking shortly after I moved to Tucson, and he spent a lot of time driving me and many others all over Southern Arizona to ride on desert singletrack. Despite being almost twice my age he (and several others even older) would routinely leave me behind on the trail, cranking up hills or blasting down them. Eventually I started to be able to keep up better, but that was partly because John sold me his beautiful Ellsworth Truth, pictured above, at a knock-down price. It’s a great bike. Too good for me, really. I’ll miss you, John.