No new posts until after July 7

Once again we will be out of internet contact for a while, so there will be no new posts until after July 7.

Reasoning flaws – moving the problem

In Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time, he quotes the following story:

“A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it’s turtles all the way down!"

This is a wonderful example of solving a problem by moving the unknowns somewhere else. Even distinguished philosophers can fall prey to this error. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas argued that everything must have a cause, so there must be a first cause which was God. Of course, that just moves the problem, because if his first premise is correct, that everything must have a cause, then we are still left with the problem of who caused the first cause, God. In essence St. Thomas didn’t solve the problem, he just moved it.

The field of physics recently went through such an exercise with “dark matter”. The universe turns out to be expanding faster than current theory says it should. That anomaly was explained for a while by positing the existence of “dark matter” – matter whose only interaction with “normal” matter is through gravity. That solved the expansion problem by moving the unknowns to a new place – dark matter. Now we may someday find that there really is such a thing as dark matter – recent experiments suggest that such material might indeed exist - but meanwhile we have simply solved one problem by moving our ignorance to a new area.

Moving the problem is not necessarily a bad thing – that is more or less the way science progresses. Each thing we come to understand simply opens up a nest of yet more subtle unknowns to explore. But it is something to watch out for. For example, glib politicians too often try to simply move their problems elsewhere, preferably onto a presumed error by the other party. This will certainly happen more than once this election season. So watch out for people who try to tell you “it’s turtles all the way down…”

Points of inflection

The interesting times in history are the points of inflection – the points at which, for some reason or other, the rules change. There were protesters before Martin Luther, but when he nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenburg, the power of the new printing medium made them rapidly accessible throughout Europe, magnifying his influence and sparking the Protestant Revolution. The invention of the cannon (in the Western world) changed military strategy profoundly. The English invention of monetary policy enabled a smaller England to defeat the much larger France of the Sun King, and allowed the English to take over superpower status from the French..

I recommend an article in the June 2008 issue of The Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Amazing Money Machine” (pg 52), about how Senator Obama has been using the internet to raise so much money with so little effort. Obama himself is not the inflection point (not yet, anyway), but he has been the first major politician to recognize that an inflection point has occurred and to take advantage of it.

When the internet first begin to get wide public use, I thought two things were true (1) the invention of the internet would in the long run be as important as the invention of the printing press, and (2) it would be generations before we really learned to use it to its fullest. Already the early internet and the early uses to which it was put seem primitive, much like the early cars that were built, literally, as “horseless carriages” – an attempt to adapt a new technology to the old ways of doing things with as little change as possible. Things get more interesting when a new generation, not locked into doing things the old ways, begin to take advantage of the change. And fortunes are being made every year in Silicon Valley by (mostly young) entrepreneurs who are expanding and exploring the possibilities inherent in social networking in an on-line world.

Senator Obama's use of the social aspects of the internet to raise money and generate support are profound enough, and will no doubt change political campaigns from here on. What I find even more intriguing are the author's speculations on how this nation-wide (indeed, world-wide) social networking may change the very nature of government.

Educational insanity!

We have in a town near us a school district (which shall remain unnamed) which has “failed” the No Child Left Behind measures for the elementary students for the past three years. Clearly a school in difficulty.

So what is the system doing next year to help this failing school system? For grades 1-6 the state is requiring them to drop all subjects beside reading and math. Yes, all other subjects! No science. No art. No geography. No history. No writing. No physical education. Children (elementary school children, mind you) will spend all morning every day reading materials geared to help them pass the state test. Then they will spend all afternoon (the worst possible time) on math. In addition, the school system will be “helped” by a board of state “experts”, none of whom has ever taught a classroom of students!

This is a solution clearly aimed at solving the state education bureaucracy’s political problem, not the student’s educational problems. I can think of few other regimes so well suited to teaching a generation of children to hate education for the rest of their lives.

I have written before about the absurdity of the No Child Left Behind initiative, but this level of insanity boggles the mind! I don’t understand why the parents of these children aren’t in a full-scale revolt against the system.

What the presidential primaries reveal

This year the presidential primaries have done their job – they have given us some advance insight into how each of the candidates might be as a president.

Senator Obama has shown that although relatively inexperienced at the national level, he can assemble and manage a highly effective team. He has also shown that he is not interested in negative campaigning and dirty tricks – a welcome relief.

Senator McCain has also shown a preference for campaigning on the issues, not on his opponent’s personality. Although he struggled early with his campaign staff, he did manage finally to pull them together to win the Republican nomination. And he has continued to show the independent streak – the willingness to say what he believes to be true rather than what people want to hear – that has made him appealing.

Senator Clinton has come off worst in the primaries. Despite having access to a number of experienced campaign managers from her husband’s staff, she chose to pick inexperienced people whose primary qualification was unswerving personal loyalty to her, and her campaign strategy has suffered for it. If she were elected president, one assumes she would follow the same pattern, most likely with the same results.

Perhaps the most telling action by Senator Clinton has been her reversal on the issue of the Florida and Michigan delegates. Back when she was the presumptive leader, she along with the other candidates agreed not to campaign in those states after the Democratic National Committee ruled against seating their delegates for moving their primaries early. In fact, Senator Obama’s name didn’t even appear on the ballot in Michigan. Yet now that she desperately needs more delegates, she has been making disingenuous arguments about how important it is to count their votes, claiming wins in those states even though there was never really a campaign in either state. The DNC has managed to find a compromise that satisfies nobody and angers both sides, but it may be a moot point since Senator Obama will probably win the nomination anyway. Perhaps more telling is Senator Clinton’s apparent willingness to embroil the Democratic Party in a nasty, protracted and potentially destructive convention fight even when her cause is lost.

So on balance the primaries this time have done what they are supposed to do - give us a trial run of the candidate's abilities.