BigThink
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Soon you shall all see….
This week I’m going to post short summaries of all my book ideas and hold a vote for which one I should actually start, should anyone care. I have about five fleshed out ideas I’ve accumulated over the past ten years or so.
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Things I don’t believe in
A list of things I don’t believe in, for no reason other than I find their proponents objectionable, or sensationalistic.
- Intelligent Design theory
- Global Warming
- Public education reform
- Keyboards in rock music
- Authenticity as a meaningful part of music
- McCarthyism being a defining moment of American History
- Native American culture being inherently earth friendly
- Anything to do with “carbs”
- Apple’s vaunted OS stability
- Apple’s better “interface”
- Any positive influence of Janis Joplin
- The oft-touted claim by libertarians that 20% of Americans are libertarian also
- “Natural” foods
- Homeopathy
- Divorce being a public/social problem
- Stem cell research being a big deal, for good or ill
- Biomass fuels
- Peak oil
- Addictive personalities
- Chiropractors
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Abortion and immigration
A long one.
I predict that soon someone will make some correlation between legal abortion and increased illegal immigration, similar to Steven Levitt’s abortion-crime idea as told in his book Freakonomics.
For those of you who haven’t read the book it spends a lot of time explaining his theory that abortions are disproportionately had by women who would otherwise bear criminal children (to put it bluntly). Those children are never born, which reduces the number of criminals, which reduces crime rates. He has a large amount of documentation and math to support this idea. Bear in mind that the 80-20 rule applies here, something like 20% of the women who get abortions have 80% of all abortions.
A similar idea (unique to me so far) is that were there no abortion, there would be many more children who would grow up to be low-skilled, low wage workers. That creates an artificial void on the bottom of the income ladder, which the Mexicans and other illegals fill.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately, and it’s all part of my emerging theory on open-source eugenics and artificial evolution, which I’ll explain more when I flesh it out.
On a related note, the pro-choice argument and the usual nativist argument are essentially the same. There is ownership in a country, as there is in one’s body. It is up to the owner; the citizens of the country collectively or the individual woman to determine who can be there (to put it crassly). Every child is a wanted child, and every immigrant, is a legal immigrant.Or that’s what I think right now anyway. Thoughts anyone?
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Quotes of the moment
The Duke of Wellington
For a great power there are no small wars
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
The fault was not decadence but the desire for holiness, the belief in sacrifice, and a willingness to serve as the butchered victim acceptable to God.
From the guide to Christianity for the secular
Christians are not easy to understand. To begin with, there are roughly 2,000 years of history to grasp, and certainly more denominations and subdivisions than that to take on board. For people who were raised secular, I imagine it’s like trying to understand an opera after coming in halfway before the end: the stage is crowded with people, two of them seem to be dead, a woman is wearing a hat with horns, and everyone is making a terrible racket.
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Interesting from the Belmont Club
Whilst perusing Wretchard’s thoughts on the current state of Iraq
Philip Bobbitt argued in his book, the Shield of Achilles, that Napoleon’s strategic revolution consisted in fielding armies so large that any sovereign who opposed him would, in matching the size of his force, be compelled to wager the entire State, and not simply a wedge of territory in confronting him. Napoleon’s campaigns were designed to kill enemy armies — and thereby enemy states. What Napoleon failed to realize in his 1812 campaign against Russia was that the Tsarist state was so primitive that the destruction of its army simply did not mean the corresponding demise of its state. Like the proverbial dinosaur of pulp fiction, Russia had no central nervous system to destroy and lumbered on, like the bullet-riddled monster of horror stories, impervious to the Grand Armee. What Russia had on its side was chaos as epitomized by its savage winters.
Saddamite Iraq, like most terrorist-supporting states threatening the world today, are like the landscape of 1812 in that they were cauldrons of anarchy given a semblance of shape by fragile, yet brutal shroud-like states.
Most of what I’ve read actually suggests that Napoleon’s brilliance was in organization of his armies, not his actual command or tactics. In Russia, he was captured by not seeing a qualitative difference between Russia and the rest of Europe. Unlike the Nazi Germany, (who did see Russia accurately, but bungled the strategy) the problem was that he did not conceive of Russia properly.
Needed – software that helps in conception via clever use of 3D motion graphics.
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An interesting article on demographics
While I disagree with him about the value of absolute number in military conflict (that has become increasingly less meaningful over time, particularly in the past 100 years) It’s a very interesting read, and falls into my own general meme that self-selection is the dominant force in our society.
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Random thoughts, quotes and links
Quote:
If you want to get even with someone, make sure it’s someone who’s done something nice for you.Thought One:
The more I read about the NSA eavesdropping thing, the more it seems like a colossal data mining operation. Question: Is it actually wiretapping if no one listens (or reads) and communication? Does the fact that someone notes that a call or email takes place constitute an surveillance?
Thought Two:
Am I the only one who thought that the govenrment was doing this already?Links:
- Clinton claimed roughly the same authority to wiretap.
- Bruce Shneier has a lot of history about eavesdropping.
- Wired’s page on domestic data mining projects.
- More PlameGate
- Always Be Cobbling (everyone check this one out, it’s the opening scene from Glengary Glen Ross, but with elves.
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Deep thought
If you had to think of a name for a band or rugby team, you could do a lot worse than the Green Apple Splatters.
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Ideas to elaborate on later
Here are ideas and historical (no emotional connection to me) events that have fundamentally affected my outlook.
In no particular order
- Pareto Optimality
- Coase Theorem
- Hayek and Sowell on the limits and costs of knowledge
- Gresham’s law
- Napoleon’s invasion of Russia
- Dominant Strategies
- Schelling Points (as elaborated on by David Friedman)
- The seatbelts kill theory of Steven Landsburg (though the theory might actually originate with George Stigler)
- The diaries of Eric Hoffer (and his books, they’re fairly similar) as they deal with mass movements
- Network effects
- Robert Nozick’s notion of morality as a time saving device (morality is used very broadly) as explained in the Examined Life
- The defensive boxing style of Pernell Whitaker
I’ll have more detail on what they are and how they are all used later.