|
|
Here.
So these two cases are very similar: both are suspected of terrorist acts, both are caught, questioned, and Mirandized, and most crucially, both cooperate with law enforcement authorities both before and after they were read their Miranda rights.
Which is why it’s completely befuddling that some politicians have used these attempted terrorist attacks to propose that we completely change the way we enforce the rule of law. Some have charged that it was mistake to Mirandize both Abdulmutallab and Shahzad, that they should have been interrogated more—some have even implied tortured—before they were read their rights. The Obama administration has caved to this naked fear-mongering: Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder told the House Judiciary Committee that the administration wants to “modernize” and “clarify” the public safety exception in terrorism cases.
Related… There is a saying about blind squirrels. But yes, credit where credit is due.
I’m filing this under “justice” instead of “politics” to keep from getting dumber. Praise to Glenn B for doing the same, and shame on Holder/Obama for filing under politics.
Another top ten list – (If that link doesn’t work, you can use this one, but then you get it split into three inconvenient pages).
6. Your mind is not your own.
Freud might have been wrong in the details, but one of his main ideas—that a lot of our behaviors and beliefs and emotions are driven by factors we are unaware of—turns out to be correct. If you’re in a happy, optimistic, ambitious mood, check the weather. Sunny days make people happier and more helpful. In a taste test, you’re likely to have a strong preference for the first sample you taste—even if all of the samples are identical. The more often you see a person or an object, the more you’ll like it. Mating decisions are based partly on smell. Our cognitive failings are legion: we take a few anecdotes and make incorrect generalizations, we misinterpret information to support our preconceptions, and we’re easily distracted or swayed by irrelevant details. And what we think of as memories are merely stories we tell ourselves anew each time we recall an event. That’s true even for flashbulb memories, the ones that feel as though they’ve been burned into the brain:
I’m not sure how disturbing this is… I get a touch of vertigo when I think about it. I don’t like the tag-line. It isn’t that your mind isn’t your own. In my book, your mind is *you*. Or a big part there-of. The vertigo is that your mind isn’t what it feels like it is… not a happy servant of the ego, so to speak. Instead it is an unfathomable set of interactions between the environment and the molecular systems in your brain, some of which we experience as immediate consciousness, some of which we don’t. And that’s an oversimplification, too. But not as bad as “your mind is not your own”.
10. The universe is made of stuff we can barely begin to imagine.
Everything you probably think of when you think of the universe—planets, stars, galaxies, black holes, dust—makes up just 4 percent of whatever is out there. The rest comes in two flavors of “dark,” or unknown stuff: dark matter, at 23 percent of the universe, and dark energy, at a whopping 73 percent:
What’s your favorite?
Oh yeah… be sure to use that second / 3 page link to get a hoot at some of the comments there.
These things pile up super quick.
Outrageous Outrage of the Day!
from Little Green Footballs
This is a case in point on the politics makes you dumb front.
NYU Students Raise More than $100,000 to Build Facebook…
from Mashable!
Via someone I follow on Google Reader. There’s a high probability I will dump Facebook for the new platform if it pans out & Facebook doesn’t clean up its act.
Links for 2010-05-13
from Uncertain Principles
His links are better than mine.
Repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
from SayUncle
Uncle noticed what MilBloggers had to say on the matter.
Like you and me, only better
from SayUncle
Just weird.
The 12 Tribes in Revelation 7
from Boston Bible Geeks
Even as a non-religious person I’m prone to be impressed by a preacher elucidating something from the Bible that you wouldn’t have noticed if you weren’t paying real close attention… but often as not the preachers are not finding something interesting there as much as they are putting interesting things there. BBG are pretty good at doing the real thing and it’s neat when they do. My applause.
The Mysterious Case of Mirin Dajo, the Human Pincushion
from Skepticblog
His show involved being run through with a fencing foil in the most realistic way possible: doing it for real. As always, the mind is boggled and wants to take the easy answer, which is of course “magic”. But the truth is stranger than fiction.
Poll: Majority of Americans Deserve Neither Liberty…
from Poli-Tea
… nor Security.
Too much television.
from View From The Porch
Another one I re-shared from someone else I follow. A cautionary tale on more than one front.
The Nature Of Scholarship in the Blogosphere
from Exploring Our Matrix
Mostly just for the cartoon… but some good links there, too.
Desperate man in electronics store toilet tweets for…
from Boing Boing
… and gets it.
Possible Breakthrough In Hydrogen Energy
from Slashdot
Headline misleading – closer to “possible breakthrough in hydrogen energy storage and transfer efficiency”. But still very worthwhile.
How’s this?
from Post Politics: Political News and Views in Tenne
Bob Corker is, depending on your view, trying to get a good idea passed by stripping it of bad baggage… or just calling a bluff. This amendment was mentioned in the last Digest, and I still think it probably is a good one.
Police torture methods questioned after “murdered”…
from Boing Boing
A Crack in the Mirror Neuron Hypothesis of Autism…
from news.sciencemag.org
Possibly also a crack in the mirror neuron hypothesis of self-consciousness, but I guess we’ll see.
Creationist vs. creationist on Homo habilis
from The Panda’s Thumb
There’s probably less difference than you think between a human and our closest living relatives – Chimpanzees, Bonobos or both. But there’s a lot less difference between humans and many of our extinct relatives in the Homo and Australopithecus lines. And sometimes the differences are so blurred that no one can reliably tell the difference. What should give alarm bells to the creationists involved here is this. Each is supremely confident that humans and our extinct neighbors can be differentiated cleanly in to human “kind” and non-human “kind” (as in “created kind”). Each confidently place these extinct neighbors into those categories. And each of those confident groupings is remarkably different than the other. Somewhere, someone should be second-guessing that supreme confidence.
The teaser at Boing-Boing for this ABC Science article on the Dunning-Kruger effect caught my eye because of the last sentence quoted there. I’ll include the last three for context – “It beautifully explains the utter confidence of those who, with no expertise, remain stubborn in their views regardless of overwhelming evidence. It makes you want to shake them by the collar and scream about how stupid they are. But evidence shows that’s not the best strategy.”
Oh yeah? Well, I had my ideas already about what a good strategy would look like in a perfect world, but there are problems with it. That perfect world approach is supported by the research:
The rather odd element of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that the incompetent don’t become aware of it until they become more competent. The key is education. Extending on their earlier experiments, Dunning and Kruger took half of their volunteers and trained them in how to solve the logic puzzles. It was as though a light went on for the under achievers. For the first time out of all the tests they began to realise that they were below average. Suddenly aware of their incompetence, they readjusted their estimates to something more realistic.
For example, before being trained they had thought that they answered five out of the ten questions correctly, whereas in reality they had barely managed to score a single mark. After being trained their estimates plummeted to a more realistic score of just one out of ten.
Yeah – so far so good. But there is a catch-22 here. Sure, if you have a real simple problem and have a captive audience, a logic puzzle, and no merry band of anti-logicians doing their best to keep their recruit, it is a simple matter to help a person increase their competence.
In the real world, though, what motivation does a person have to increase their own competence when they are already unshakeably certain that they are fully competent? What if these confident beliefs are part of a cultural identity that no one wishes to surrender? What if their self-satisfaction is reinforced continuously by their peers?
What do you* do when a D-K-er refuses to be taught how to work the logic puzzle?
Unfortunately, I didn’t see any clues to help answer that. Feel free to brainstorm in the comments.
* Writing this, I tried to figure out a way to avoid coming off as arrogant. I couldn’t figure out a way to do it. People who know me know that I’m not immune to a bout of it, but the quick answer is “no, I don’t think I’m the all-knowing one whose job it is to educate the rest of the world.” On the other hand, I do perceive that anyone who does have a little bit of good information has an increasingly difficult job getting it out these days. And it’s not my problem and not my business… but if there is a secret to the game, I’d love to know what it is.
Well Uncle Al had the 2010 Spider Farm Concert and it was lots of fun. The weather was gorgeous during the day but it did get a little cold after the sun went down for an elderly guy who decided for some reason to wear shorts.
This year a couple of the tunes were posted up on youtube so here they are for your enjoyment.
Working Man Blues and Precious Lord.
That ain’t bad porch jammin’ in my opinion.
Ripped entirely from Skeptical science:
A letter Climate Change and the Integrity of Science has been published in the journal Science. It’s written by 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel laureates (here’s the complete list plus their university affiliations). I recommend reading the entire letter but here is an excerpt:
There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet…
… The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientific assessments of climate change, which involve thousands of scientists producing massive and comprehensive reports, have, quite expectedly and normally, made some mistakes. When errors are pointed out, they are corrected. But there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change:
- The planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. A snowy winter in Washington does not alter this fact.
- Most of the increase in the concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.
- Natural causes always play a role in changing Earth’s climate, but are now being overwhelmed by human-induced changes.
- Warming the planet will cause many other climatic patterns to change at speeds unprecedented in modern times, including increasing rates of sea-level rise and alterations in the hydrologic cycle. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are making the oceans more acidic.
- The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more.
Much more can be, and has been, said by the world’s scientific societies, national academies, and individuals, but these conclusions should be enough to indicate why scientists are concerned about what future generations will face from business-as-usual practices. We urge our policy-makers and the public to move forward immediately to address the causes of climate change, including the un restrained burning of fossil fuels.
The scientists are the members of the NAS most familiar with climate science, as explained by lead signer Peter Gleick:
It is hard to get 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to agree on pretty much anything, making the import of this letter even more substantial. Moreover, only a small fraction of National Academy members were asked to sign (the signatories are all members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences but were not speaking on its behalf). Because of a desire to produce a statement quickly, the coordinators of the letter focused on those sections of the NAS most familiar with climate science and the ongoing debate. But the NAS (and Academies of Sciences and other professional scientific societies from dozens of other nations) has previously published a long set of assessments and reviews of the science of climate change, which support the conclusions laid out in the Science essay.
Lastly, here is a link to the National Academy of Science’s Policy advice, based on science, to guide the nation’s response to climate change.
If Neanderthals are concerned, I think the better phrase is bumping uglies.
Seriously… Yes there are political lessons for today in this, but I don’t wish to draw them out so much as to clarify the past. In part because of today’s political climate, people have forgotten what socialism is. In part because of forgetting what socialism is, people have forgotten what capitalism is. A clear-eyed look at the past might help undo some of that confusion, and let the political chips fall where they may.
A clear-eyed look at the past will tell you the difference between Adam Smith and Ayn Rand. It is that Adam Smith was sane.
|
|
Recent Comments