No blogging has happened here since I started blogging at Samizdata, although there hasn’t been much of that lately either for various reasons. In theory, I’ll continue to post things here that don’t fit on Samizdata.
My best bits from Samizdata:
The point at which we begin to let a political agenda dictate what science is all about is the point when science ceases to be a viable enterprise.
So says Gordon Gallup, Jr. But he’s not talking about climate change, oh no.
The big boss of R&D at my company just emailed around this awesome video. It shows a scatter graph of income and longevity animated over time. The results, and Hans Rosling’s enthusiasm, are enthralling.
Maybe there is hope for the BBC yet.
I don’t normally do Friday cat blogging, but I saw the story of cat calledDr. Zoe D. Katze, Ph.D., C.Ht., DAPA on QI. Steve K. D. Eichel, Ph.D., ABPP wanted to make a point, and managed to get his cat lots of hypnotherapy credentials.
In the nefarious world of quasi-credentialing and diploma scams, money talks. Or at least it meows. All I had to do was get Zoe her first credential, which I did by filling out an “application for certification” on a lay hypnosis association’s website. I charged her application fee, and within a few weeks, Zoe had her first piece of paper. Since most lay hypnosis associations have a reciprocity agreement respecting each others’ certifications, it was a snap to obtain additional (and very impressive sounding) certificates.
Zoe is (or was, since I doubt I will pay certification maintenance fees) certified by the National Guild of Hypnotists, the American Board of Hypnotherapy, and the International Medical & Dental Hypnotherapy Association. She is a Professional Member of the American Association of Professional Hypnotherapists
And so on. Eichel says that the proliferation of credentials (and pseudocredentials) is caused by oversupply of practitioners struggling to differentiate themselves, and lots of specialisation into variously dubious fields. All this has lead to a wide array of credentials that confuse the customers.
To his credit, Eichel is not demanding more laws to regulate matters. He doesn’t think government interference would help and doesn’t like the idea of the government telling people which kind of therapies are good and which are bad. Rather, he is seeking to point out the problems and damage the reputations of the pseudo-credentialing organisations. Which seems to me the correct way to go.
He is supportive of medical licensing because it is a matter of life and death, but it seems to me that if people were used to having to check out credentials properly instead of relying on government to do the job for them, they would be less likely to fall for fake credentials.
Lord James of Blackheath made a very good speech about multiculturalism, which concludes, “If we stop dictating to and preconditioning people, it works very well.”
That’s the same Lord James of Blackheath who has been investigating the mysterious Foundation X, who I think must be socialist extraterrestrials.
Hat tip Joseph Cotterill.
Awesome, awesome, awesome. Especially the line just beneath the table.
I’d heard about it before, but finally went to read it after Eric Raymond blogged about it. It being:
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
In which Eliezer Yudkowsky “re-invents Harry Potter as a skeptic genius who sets himself the task of figuring out just how all this “magic” stuff works”.
It’s quite a learning experience, especially if you look up the bits you don’t understand. For example, I now know what arbitrage is.
Here’s a snippet from chapter one:
“Then you don’t have to fight over this,” Harry said firmly. Hoping against hope that this time, just this once, they would listen to him. “If it’s true, we can just get a Hogwarts professor here and see the magic for ourselves, and Dad will admit that it’s true. And if not, then Mum will admit that it’s false. That’s what the experimental method is for, so that we don’t have to resolve things just by arguing.”
The Professor turned and looked down at him, dismissive as usual. “Oh, come now, Harry. Really, magic? When you say that rationality is your favorite thing ever and read so much about it? I thought you’d know better than to take this seriously, son, even if you’re only ten. Magic is just about the most unscientific thing there is!”
[...]
“Mum,” Harry said. “If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There’s a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation – that you just have to look at the world and report what you see. Um… I can’t think offhand of where to find something about how it’s an ideal of science to settle things by experiment instead of violence or violent arguments -”
The author uses the pen name Less Wrong, which comes from a “community wiki devoted to refining the art of human rationality” called Less Wrong.
It’s the sort of site within which I imagine I could spend hours following the cross references. I haven’t yet, but one article about absence of evidence not being evidence of absence ends on this paragraph:
Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality; if you are equally good at explaining any outcome you have zero knowledge. The strength of a model is not what it can explain, but what it can’t, for only prohibitions constrain anticipation. If you don’t notice when your model makes the evidence unlikely, you might as well have no model, and also you might as well have no evidence; no brain and no eyes.
Which immediately made me think of global warmists who seem to always strive to fit the evidence to their hypotheses.
That site also contains lots of arguments about how to change your mind. One of these is titled Politics is the Mindkiller. Perhaps this will be a good site to go to to challenge my beliefs.
In between the touring car races are other races, one of which today was the Ginetta Junior Championship, in which 14-17 year-olds race around in sports cars.
Take that Frank Furedi!
Today’s race was very wet and there were lots of crashes. I don’t know whether that was because of the weather or the inexperience of the drivers. But they were doing it, boys and girls, post race TV interview by the winner and all.
It’s a rainy bank holiday weekend. I’m surfing 500 channels of satellite TV just to see what’s there. Total Wipeout USA, in which contestants take part in a series of silly, oversized, water based obstacle courses, is very funny. The serious-looking commentators in fact make very dry jokes.
This is an actual episode synopsis from a soap opera called The Bold and the Beautiful:
Storm kills himself after accidentally shooting Katie and his heart is used as a transplant organ for her, while Donna and Eric prepare to get married.
A TV commercial for Curry’s is offering £10 money back for every goal England score in the World Cup, when you spend £600 on a TV. I wonder how expensive that will be for them.
I found a good programme. How It’s Made does exactly what it says on the tin, explaining how various items are manufactured. It’s the sort of programme I’d want my kids to watch. It nicely demonstrates the message of I, Pencil.
Now I have found the British Touring Car Championship on ITV4, and the rain is making it interesting. I’ll watch that for a bit.
I discovered today, to my great dismay, that Samizdata is blocked by Websense corporate web filtering software under the category “weapons”. According to Websense, the category is for
Sites that provide information about, promote, or support the sale of weapons and related items.
Whether this is the result of an oversensitive Bayseian algorithm or some kind of human intervention I have no idea. It certainly doesn’t seem right.
