How Language Changes, Sometimes for Political Purposes

Posted on Tuesday 25 June 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Three items from the news the past few days. First, some quotes from a piece about how climate change deniers have refined their game.

TNR, The New Republic, Genevieve Guenther, 24 Jun 2024: The New Climate Denial Is Based on These Six Terms, subtitled “The new obstructionist approach doesn’t say global warming isn’t happening. Instead, it argues we don’t need to phase out oil and gas.”

The larger issue here is that deniers of climate change, evolution, vaccines, and so on, *always* have an ulterior motive. They’re never interested about the pure science of the matters (else there are *lots* of other things they might be concerned about). In the case of climate change, whatever their surface arguments are, their underlying motivation is to preserve the status quo, in this case the interests of the fossil fuel industries.

But OK, what are their six terms? The piece begins: Continue reading →

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Steven Pinker: THE BLANK SLATE, post 3

Posted on Monday 24 June 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Summaries and comments about three more chapters of Steven Pinker’s THE BLANK SLATE;
  • And YouTube tracks from one of my favorite film scores: Richard Robbins’ for The Remains of the Day.

I’ll try to get through the rest of book this week, though I’ll need to be more succinct, or I’ll never finish. Three chapters done previously; 17 to go. Three more in this post.

Chapter 3 described the steps that led to the fall of the walls between matter and mind — the material and spiritual, and so on. Via cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral genetics, and evolutionary psychology.

— Ch4, Culture Vultures

Culture is not simply absorbed by people; it depends on learning, which relies on faculties of the mind. Much of culture is simply accumulated local wisdom. People tend to follow the norms of their community. Many things in life lie along a continuum, but decisions must often be binary. [[ well, this is a good point ]] And some conventions exist only in people’s minds [[ one of Harari’s central themes ]]. Cultures, like languages, become different when separated. Why do some cultures dominate others? It’s not about race, cf books by Thomas Sowell and Jared Diamond [[ the latter is GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL ]]. Geography was destiny. Nonscientists fear a kind of reductionism. But there’s greedy and good reductionism; the latter is hierarchical [[ as we’ve seen in Carroll and currently in Brian Greene ]]. The very word ‘understanding’ means a kind of reductionism, i.e. descending to deeper levels of analysis. Summary para:

Our understanding of life has only been enriched by the discovery that living flesh is composed of molecular clockwork rather than quivering protoplasm, or that birds soar by exploiting the laws of physics rather than defying them. In the same way, our understanding of ourselves and our cultures can only be enriched by the discovery that our minds are composed of intricate neural circuits for thinking, feeling, and learning rather than bank slates, amorphous blobs, or inscrutable ghosts.

Continue reading →

Posted in Book Notes, MInd, Music, Science, Steven Pinker | Comments Off on Steven Pinker: THE BLANK SLATE, post 3

Understanding Human Nature

Posted on Sunday 23 June 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Ultimately, everything in the daily news makes sense through an honest understanding of human nature. (It is not there are two legitimate “sides” to every issue.) Two thought pieces for today, then a bunch of shorter items.

  • About how macaques — and humans — actually cooperate in stressful situations, despite popular narratives;
  • About how philosopher Charles Taylor thinks the world needs the pre-scientific understanding of the world, to restore “a shared sense of meaning and purpose”;
  • Shorter items about how Iowans don’t want to hear about climate science; a list of GOP lies; a left-wing charge that NYT and WaPo are exaggerating the threat of Trump; how FRC claims tolerance is evil; how since Reagan the GOP has slid into authoritarianism and ignorance; how conservatives don’t want to hear that crime rates are falling.

NY Times, Rachel Nuwer, 20 Jun 2024: After a Weather Disaster, a Surprise: Some Ornery Monkeys Got Nicer, subtitled “Macaques, reeling from a hurricane, learned by necessity to get along, a study found. It’s one of the first to suggest that animals can adapt to environmental upheaval with social changes.” [shared link]

I heard this exact story somewhere else recently — on 60 Minutes? Yes, it’s right here. Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Evolution, Human Progress, Humanism, Philosophy | Comments Off on Understanding Human Nature

Locus Awards 2024

Posted on Saturday 22 June 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Quick post at nearly 8 in the evening, just home from the Locus Awards. Like last year, they were held live at Preservation Park in downtown Oakland; last year’s report is here, and I’m going to borrow a photo from that post for tonight’s report.

Neither the Silverbergs nor Connie Willis attended this year. In Connie’s place, sorta, was Cory Doctorow, masked throughout the afternoon, who gave a keynote speech of sorts mid-way through presentation of the awards. He talked about Luddites, the talk drawn from one of his Locus columns (posted here) about how SF is not about prediction, but about contestation, in particular to challenge the narratives of Silicon Valley elites who seem to be trying to live out the visions of science fiction novels they read as teenagers… Didn’t have a chance to chat with Cory, or to say hi. (Not sure he’d remember me.)

The awards ceremony was led by Henry Lien, dressed up as mythical science fiction character, Emperor Stardust [ added 25jun24 per Facebook comments ] playing a long Chinese banjo, singing about Princess Locus and providing clever two-line intros to each of the award categories. The presenters ranged from Locus folks like Liza Groen Trombi and Tim Pratt, to some young writers I had never heard of before, to Cory Doctorow himself. None of the winners was there; all appeared via pre-recorded videos for their acceptance speeches.

Like last year I had seen the winners in a pre-publication PDF of the July issue that I got a couple days ago. As I write Locus hasn’t posted the winners yet, but I expect them to do so any minute…

We did have nice chats with Bob Blough, Tim Pratt, and Jacob Weisman, and said hi in passing to the other Locus VIPs.

Posted in Personal history, science fiction | Comments Off on Locus Awards 2024

Loyalty vs. Principles

Posted on Friday 21 June 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Three threads today, all related.

  • Considering whistle-blowing as an example of wrestling loyalty vs. principles, and how this applies to Trump and his followers;
  • Related items about how Trump supporters vow to “lie, cheat, and steal”; how Donald Trump knows what he’s doing; how the GOP Louisiana lawmaker can’t answer the question about why she presumes her own religion’s rules should be imposed upon everyone;
  • And Salon’s Amanda Marcotte on how Republicans violate the Ten Commandments every day, and how MAGA folks think rules are for other people.

Here’s a piece that triggers wide-ranging thoughts. More nascent conclusions.

Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams, 20 Jun 2024: The toll of truth: What happens when you expose medical wrongdoing?, subtitled “Whistleblowers are often shunned and discredited, but honoring one’s moral code is ultimately worth it”

I’m not even quoting from this piece; my concern is the broader question of loyalty vs. principle.

Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Evolution, Morality | Comments Off on Loyalty vs. Principles

The Ten Commandments as the Distillation of Tribal Morality

Posted on Thursday 20 June 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

What to make of the continued efforts by the religious conservatives to impose the Ten Commandments onto schoolchildren and passerby in America’s courtrooms? Which part of the First Amendment don’t they understand? Some part presumption and some part ignorance and some part tribal motivations — the need to impose one’s one ideology/story/narrative on others. Two items today.

First: The governor of Louisiana, Republican Jeff Landry, signed a bill that requires the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools. Moreover, he brags that he “can’t wait to be sued” as others who’ve tried to do this have (and lost).

Hemant Mehta makes the first obvious observation.

Friendly Atheist, 20 Jun 2024: Louisiana will be sued over new law forcing Ten Commandments display in classrooms

The bill specifies the language for the Commandment to be posted:

Continue reading →

Posted in Culture, Morality, Religion | Comments Off on The Ten Commandments as the Distillation of Tribal Morality

Inherent Ignorance; Juneteenth; Republican schemes about tariffs.

Posted on Wednesday 19 June 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Another three tracks for today.

  • Are some people so ignorant that they believe the creation of the world (and the US) happened 2023 years ago? An example from Facebook.
  • How Juneteenth suggests considering the relationship between MAGA and the Old South;
  • How Republican animosity to income taxes, in favor of tariffs, have led some of them to dismisses all US economists as communists.

Here’s a graphic from Facebook. What point should we take from this? Ostensibly this item, posted on a Facebook group I subscribe to called America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy (which isn’t necessarily about America per se, but never mind), portrays someone who thinks the current calendar year is based on the creation of both the universe and the United States. I suppose if you’ve never been to school or read a book, it’s a plausible mistake to make.

Some of the comments suggest the post is fake, a spoof, to ‘own’ people who like to laugh at other people’s stupidity. At the same time, there are plenty of those person-on-the-street interviews in which a guy with a microphone asks a random person “How many states are there in the United States” or “If you’re 20 today how old were you seven years ago” and people give nonsensical answers, betraying ignorance both of history and society and of elementary arithmetic.

Continue reading →

Posted in conservatives, Economics, History | Comments Off on Inherent Ignorance; Juneteenth; Republican schemes about tariffs.

Beware Intuition and Common Sense

Posted on Tuesday 18 June 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Three tracks today:

  • Steven Pinker on how democracy and enlightenment values are not intuitive (even though they’ve led to the betterment of humanity);
  • Items about conservative meanings of ‘truth’ and ‘facts’; how evangelicals think sex is only for purposes of reproduction; and how conservatives keep threatening violence to get their way;
  • Update about the new Crowded House album, wherein I’ve discovered that “Teenage Summer” is the same as “Life’s Imitation.”

First up: Jerry Coyne links this interview with Steven Pinker today at a YouTube site called The Free Press

A key theme of this blog: the perils of common sense. At best, common sense, intuition, gut feelings, work in small environments where the range of situations you’ve encountered over your entire life is small enough that each new situation can be related to something already known. But they don’t work, and are often counter-productive, in new situations that are truly new, like those encountered in the big wide world beyond the boundaries of the local tribe or community. Which is where we’re all living now. (Except perhaps for those people in Oklahoma, yesterday.)

Continue reading →

Posted in Culture, Music, Politics, Science | Comments Off on Beware Intuition and Common Sense

Small Town Thinking, Climate Change, and Smoking Cigars

Posted on Monday 17 June 2024 by Mark R. Kelly
  • What people in small-town Oklahoma think;
  • Today’s headlines about the effects of climate change;
  • A lagniappe about Republicans who need to smoke their cigars; and recalling the assumptions of 1940s science fiction by Isaac Asimov.

We coastal elites are sensitive to dismissing the middle states of the US as mere flyover states, but really, people, you need to try a bit harder, you people who say things like these.

NY Times, guest essay by Scott Ellsworth, 14 Jun 2024: Where There’s a Trump Highway but Not Many Trump Flags

The writer, a historian who grew up in Oklahoma, visits Cimarron County, “at the very tip” of the Oklahoma Panhandle.

“I don’t watch Fox News — I thought they went way too liberal during the last election.” The speaker was Clint Twombly, a former Border Patrol agent who is running for sheriff. Standing inside the cinder-block building where the Boise City Rotary Club meets every Wednesday at noon, Mr. Twombly delivered his first ever campaign speech.

Like most of the locals I talked with, he dismissed any concerns over global warming. Instead, he said, climate change is all about “somebody trying to sell a book and make money, rather than anything to do with science.” As for the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, he said that “all in all, it seemed to me fairly innocuous.” Mr. Twombly was unaware that any police officers had died after the attack.

Continue reading →

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Emergence, Complexity, and the Potential for Human Understanding

Posted on Sunday 16 June 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

Here are a couple scientific topics that I don’t pretend to understand, at least not in any depth. What I find fascinating is how, while the big-scale scientific conclusions have been fairly stable for several decades (as noted two weeks ago), smaller studies reveal endless new perspectives that fall from those conclusions. It’s a bit like color: the perceived color of anything depends on the object itself, the kind of light falling upon it, and the human eye’s own biases in interpreting color against backgrounds and the surrounding of objects of other colors.

Quanta Magazine, Philip Ball, 10 Jun 2024: The New Math of How Large-Scale Order Emerges: “The puzzle of emergence asks how regularities emerge on macro scales out of uncountable constituent parts. A new framework has researchers hopeful that a solution is near.”

Very broadly, the issue here is whether or not complex systems can be ‘explained’ in terms of simpler system, or whether ’emergent’ properties are needed to explain them. Certain such properties help; this is a theme of the Brian Greene book I mentioned (in that same post two weeks ago). But the philosophical issue of how such properties emerge is apparently tricky. I’ll quote a bit.

Continue reading →

Posted in MInd, Physics, Science | Comments Off on Emergence, Complexity, and the Potential for Human Understanding