Critical Thinking page from Life Hack — a short but nice primer on CT. I love the following quote:
The ability to think critically might not be as prized in our society as good looks, tremendous wealth or a quick tongue, but it is probably the most useful skill a person can develop.
ChangingMinds.org — a HUGE site on “all aspects of how we change what others think, believe, feel and do.” The site is for sales and marketing people, and others who need persuasion, as well as (and more importantly, for us critical thinkers) the victims and targets of persuasion.
There’s not much more you could ask for from a post than this (except maybe beer and sci-fi). But it’s not my post; it’s my friend and fellow Rush fan™ Steve Horwitz’s post on The Freeman:
Key paragraphs:
…
This past Sunday, I took 24 hours out of my calling to head up to Montreal (with my long-suffering but very tolerant Rush-widow wife) to see the brand new feature documentary on their career, “Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage,” in the theatre before it airs on U.S. cable later this month. Not surprisingly, I thought it was great, but my own reactions aside, I wanted to emphasize one key theme of the film, as it illustrates that callings come in many flavors but all share some essential features if they are successful.
The key is the way in which Rush’s history is a story of three guys who, despite having enormous talent, almost saw their vision die and then endured a couple of decades of awful reviews from the “official” rock press, only to have the last laugh in the long run. After almost 40 years, Rush continues to put out new music and play to sold-out crowds, with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones the only bands to have more consecutive gold records.
How they did this has lessons for anyone who thinks he or she has a calling, and for libertarians in particular…
The lesson from the film is that people with a “calling,” no matter the type, should recognize six keys to turning it into a success:
1. Commit to being the best you can be at whatever it is you do.
2. Be open to improving yourself by learning from other talented people.
3. Have a vision of what you want to achieve.
4. Stick to that vision even in the worst of times, and do not pander.
5. If the guardians of truth and taste don’t like it, take it directly to the people.
6. Learn not to take yourself too seriously.
What these mean for libertarians is that we need to be well-read in theory and history and on top of every current issue, but also open to learning from those who disagree with us. We need to continue to articulate our vision and stick to it even when things get bad. Like now. There are atheists in foxholes, and there are libertarians in financial crises. When we’re dismissed by Paul Krugman and the New York Times, we just have to keep cranking it out online. And we do need to remember to be willing to laugh at ourselves a bit.
“All models are wrong. Some models are useful.” — George Box
This Freeman Online article by Max Borders posits that the word model “may be the most dangerous word in the English language right now.”
Models justify a lot of the bad policies that have been, or soon will be, foisted on us. For example, what was used to justify the fiscal policy of the big “stimulus”? That’s right. And as I wrote this, “experts” were using models to gear us up for another one.
More than a year after the original “stimulus,” not only are economists nowhere near consensus about its effects but few if any of the models used to justify it have turned out to be right. Obamanomic adviser Christina Romer, for example, has come under heavy criticism because her team’s plan has performed abysmally. The model behind the plan predicted unemployment would peak at 8.3 percent. It exceeded 10 percent before dropping back slightly. In defending her plan she appealed to counterfactuals—that is, how bad things could have been without it. That her team failed to reach its rosy targets, she says, “prevents people from focusing on the positive impact.” But did Romer ever consider the possibility that her model was just wrong?
When it comes to prediction and explanation, macroeconomic models are often just as bad after the fact as before it.
I suspect the same can be said of most models of complex systems (e.g., climate models).
Specifically regarding macroeconomic models, Borders says that failed models have several traits in common:
They’re rendered either in impenetrable math or with sophisticated computers, requiring a lot of popular (and political) faith.
Politicians and policy wizards hide behind this impenetrability, both to evade public scrutiny and to secure their status as elites.
Models vaguely resemble the real-world phenomena they’re meant to explain but often fail to track with reality when the evidence comes in.
They’re meant to model complex systems, but such systems resist modeling. Complexity makes things inherently hard to predict and forecast.
They’re used by people who fancy themselves planners—not just predictors or describers—of complex phenomena.
… a Maredsous Bruin (also known as a Maredsous #8).
This is a Belgian Strong Ale — actually, I think it qualifies as a dubbel. It is brewed by Brouwerij Moortgat, a Belgian brewery.
It pours a very dark brown, with a red tint when held up to a light. Aroma is of bread and nutmeg, sugary and sweet. Taste, unfortunately, is rather biting — tinny and metallic, and the alcohol (at only 8% ABV) is very noticeable. The metallic taste tends to overpower the otherwise nice flavor — malts, dark fruits (figs and raisins), and sweetness. I was just a bit disappointed.
I rated this a 3.2 on Ratebeer.com, where its average score is a 3.55. Westmalle Dubbel remains my favorite dubbel (3.86).
Whenever someone says, “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we do <X>,” they are guilty of the “man on the moon” fallacy. I just invented it.
It is related to the false analogy fallacy and perhaps the non sequitur as well. But it is so ubiquitous — and so wrong — that I think it deserves to be highlighted as a unique fallacy all its own.
Putting a man on the moon was a remarkable achievement, but it was a straightforward well-defined engineering challenge, and a problem susceptible to having huge bales of money thrown at it, which is exactly how it was done…
But most of the other problems for which people have pled for a solution, using Apollo as an example, were, and are, less amenable to being solved by a massive public expenditure. We may in fact cure cancer, and have made great strides over the past four decades in doing so, but it’s a different kind of problem, involving science and research on the most complex machine ever built — the human body. It isn’t a problem for which one can simply set a goal and time table and put the engineers to work on it, as Apollo was. Similarly, ending world hunger and achieving world peace are socio-political problems, not technological ones (though technology has made great strides in improving food production, which makes the problem easier to solve for governments that are competent and not corrupt). So most of the uses of the phrase never really made much sense, often being non sequiturs.
It’s important to understand that landing a man on the moon (or developing atomic weaponry as in the Manhattan Project — another example used by proponents of a new federal energy program) was a technological achievement. Achieving “energy independence,” or ending the use of fossil fuels, are economic ones. And the former is not necessarily even a desirable goal, if by that one means only getting energy from domestic sources. Energy is, and should remain, part of the global economy and trade system if we want to continue to keep prices as low as possible and continue to provide economic growth.
According to prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider Mike Hulme, the IPCC consensus on man-made global warming was phony, and consisted of only a “few dozen scientists” rather than 2,500 of the “world’s leading climate scientists” as the IPCC claimed.
Study after study has shown that immigrants grow the economy, expanding demand for goods and services that the foreign-born workers and their families consume, and thereby creating jobs. There is even broad agreement among economists that while immigrants may push down wages for some, the overall effect is to increase average wages for American-born workers.
ADDENDUM: There are some good reasons to oppose illegal immigration; for instance: (1) The existence of illegal immigrants is proof that our borders are not secure, which is a significant terrorism concern; and (2) Laws are either important or they are not; a society which picks and chooses which laws to enforce and which to ignore is edging towards becoming a lawless society. But let’s drop the crime rate and jobs arguments, because they don’t hold water.
Britain’s premier scientific institution is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind’s contribution to rising temperatures.
The Royal Society has appointed a panel to rewrite the 350-year-old institution’s official position on global warming. It will publish a new “guide to the science of climate change” this summer. The society has been accused by 43 of its Fellows of refusing to accept dissenting views on climate change and exaggerating the degree of certainty that man-made emissions are the main cause.
It seems like the U.K. has historically led the U.S. by a couple of years in changes in attitudes towards global warming. It will be interesting to see if this sort of rebellion against the “consensus” happens within the National Science Foundation and/or American Meteorological Society a few years down the road.
Today, as it has been for a century, American politics is an argument between two Princetonians — James Madison, Class of 1771, and Woodrow Wilson, Class of 1879. Madison was the most profound thinker among the Founders. Wilson, avatar of “progressivism,” was the first president critical of the nation’s founding. Barack Obama’s Wilsonian agenda reflects its namesake’s rejection of limited government.
A must-read. Go read it all. Here’s another great paragraph:
Lacking a limiting principle, progressivism cannot say how big the welfare state should be but must always say that it should be bigger than it currently is. Furthermore, by making a welfare state a fountain of rights requisite for democracy, progressives in effect declare that democratic deliberation about the legitimacy of the welfare state is illegitimate.
So in memory of Touchdown Jesus (as it’s called), and by request from several people, here is a re-post of something I did on my now-defunct humor blog, The Stinker, back in early 2008.
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Oh, hai readers.
Let me just say right up front that there is NO blasphemy being committed in this post. I’m just making fun of a statue today. That’s all, just a statue. I am NOT making fun of the Son of God whatsoever. Not even a little. I’m only poking fun at the outrageously ostentatious statue of Him that sits at the side of I-75 near Monroe, Ohio, just about 20 miles south of where I live.
Here is the statue:
Yes, that’s right: $250K for a 62 foot-tall statue. Seems to me like somebody’s priorities are out of whack. If anybody is committing blasphemy, it is the Solid Rock Church; by virtue of their statue they have turned Jesus into a symbol of ostentatious wealth, thereby perverting His teachings.
Maybe God should give these people a smiting. Or if it’s not too presumptuous of me, I’ll just go ahead and give them a smiting myself. But since I’m not omnipotent like God, my smiting will of course be a pretty small one. In His infinite wisdom He saw fit to not impart any superpowers upon me. Really, I can only smite at them with humor, since it’s all I’ve got.
So let’s get the obvious one out of the way first:
And again, it’s the STATUE I’m making fun of here. A big lump of fiberglass, Styrofoam, and metal framing. That cost a quarter of a million dollars. And by proxy, of course what I’m really doing is making fun of the people who paid to have this thing built and installed here.
And another one:
Now, it occurs to me that some teenage punk in the Monroe, Ohio area just might read this one day and get the idea that it would be a great prank for him and his drunken friends to sneak onto the church grounds late one night and add a Jacob’s ladder to the Big-J statue. Say, by getting a couple hundred feet of brightly colored rope and weighting it on one end so they can throw it up repeatedly through the statue’s hands, pulling it tight as they go, into the Jacob’s ladder formation. No climbing needed. And they should probably come in from the farm to the north, but keep away from the fence along I-75 so they won’t be spotted by any passing highway patrol cars. They should also try to avoid being back-lit by the lights of the church complex. Maybe all of them should carry cell phones (set to vibrate) and post a lookout near Union Road, another north in the farmer’s fields, and another in the fields to the south for an alternate escape route. Yes, maybe some Monroe kid will read this blog post one day and will think up a plan such as this.
So let me just add the following disclaimer: The Stinker does not advocate pranks involving the defacement, whether permanently damaging or not, of other people’s property. Oh, The Stinker would laugh his ass off, don’t get me wrong. But he does not advocate. The Stinker suggests you Monroe kids just stick to cow tipping.
Here’s another:
Well, this one would be too hard to set up as a prank so no disclaimer is really needed here. I doubt the Monroe kids could ever come up with a 40-foot cookie sheet. (Giant oven mitts, maybe.)
And I doubt they could set up this one either:
That is all. The smiting is finished for now. Let that be a warning to you Solid Rock Church hypocrites to get your priorities back in whack before Judgment Day.
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Heh, looks like God finished the smiting for me after all!
There’s not much more you could ask for from a post than this (except maybe beer and sci-fi). But it’s not my post; it’s my friend and fellow Rush fan™ Steve Horwitz’s 
