1. Research Volunteers Needed

Comment #175404 by weel on May 5, 2008 at 10:56 am

I like the question "Economists often try to predict where the economy is headed." A lot of economists get very irritated at the suggestion that forecasting is or should be their major task, or even just at the concept that what they study is "the economy" (rather than any human phenomenon that can plausibly be thought of as involving choice under scarcity.)

2. New atheists or new anti-dogmatists?

Comment #117513 by weel on January 29, 2008 at 2:34 am

I really like this article, and I am glad to see that many other commenters can appreciate it.

As for Occam's razor: yes, it is a dogma of sorts, or at least a postulate, but you can get around it by defining "force equals mass times acceleration" as "to the best of our knowledge, the most straightforward theory consistent with the facts is that force equals mass times acceleration." Etcetera. Scientists don't usually spell this out, but logically speaking it's all they can say.

It is even possible that you can have a theory where one part is simple but you need some ad-hoc assumptions elsewhere, and another where you can eliminate those ad-hoc assumptions at the cost of complicating the simple bit. Thus, Occam's razor doesn't necessarily always lead to a single answer.

But none of that means that there is any reason to wantonly assume wholesale collections of dogma that are obviously derived from ancient folk-tales and tribal taboos.

Science, in the end, is about critical thinking, which means both questioning all your hypotheses and knowing which ones to question first. If I observe something that goes against Newtonian mechanics, and the process it comes out of is not particularly small or fast, I will first check my measurement device before rushing off a paper to the Physical Review. That's what Occam's razor is all about, and it has so far been remarkably successful at helping us summarize enormous collections of facts with surprisingly simple theories.

3. Banks are helping sharia make a back-door entrance

Comment #116317 by weel on January 26, 2008 at 8:40 am

PrimeNumbers,

"I fail to see the need to bend over backwards to Muslims"

But the bank doesn't; it is not a government or a political movement leaning one way or another, it is simply a profit-making corporation catering to what it perceives as the wishes of some of its customers. Now you and I may think it is pretty silly for people (1) to expect a bank to follow rules that are many centuries old and pre-date modern finance, and (2) to expect banking to be possible without something that is effectively similar to interest, and (3) to believe that by some clever clerically approved accounting manipulations unholy interest can be transformed into halal sharing of profit.

But it's not the bank's fault that its customers demand what they demand any more than it is a furniture store's fault if its customers demand fake antique chairs made of dark-brown stained pine that are soooo two decades ago, or a hairdresser's fault if customers insist on a Maggie Thatcher hairdo.

4. Shermer's 'Mind of the Market' Reviewed in L.A. Times

Comment #116270 by weel on January 26, 2008 at 5:33 am

Here's a very different review of the same book by Tyler Cowen in the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/23/AR2008012303386.html

5. Violence fear over Islam film

Comment #113924 by weel on January 21, 2008 at 2:30 am

The article talks about "Geert Wilders, one of nine members of the extremist VVD (Freedom) party." This is wrong. In fact, Geert Wilders broke away from VVD (Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie, or "People's Party for Freedom and Democracy") to start the extremist PVV (Partij voor de Vrijheid, or "Party of Liberty") party.

The PVV name is misleading. There is nothing liberal or libertarian or otherwise liberty-minded about the party. It is a single-issue party focused on blaming all social ills on Muslims.

VVD, on the other hand, is a fairly mainstream classical-liberal political party (think The Economist's editorial stance but with an added touch of populism) that has frequently been part of cabinet coalitions, including the late-90s "purple" coalitions with PvdA (Party of Labor). Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in particular, started out as a PvdA MP and later moved over to VVD.