It’s not so much that they are wrong… though they are. It’s their so very condescending self assured attitude that would cause me to rage like a madman in a similar situation. But I’m glad we have people like Krugman.
Sometimes I just really badly want people like this to be proven wrong. But sadly that wouldn’t work since A. it would mean untold human suffering and B. they wouldn’t admit they were wrong anyway and likely argue for more of the same.
One Agency veteran relayed what he described as Petraeus’ request list to the Back Channel. Among the items:
Fresh pineapple each night before he goes to bed (not canned)
Sliced bananas for his cereal in the morning
Someone to accompany him on his morning runs, and a route devised that preferably avoids crossing any streets.
Also, he noted, the former General doesn’t open doors. “All doors have to be open when he arrives,” the former senior CIA officer said.
In addition, the intelligence chief requests that six empty wine glasses be placed in his room, in case he needs to host foreign dignitaries or members of the travel party after a long day of meetings.
"—
http://backchannel.al-monitor.com/index.php/2012/05/gen-petraeus-rider/
This is as the article says largely becoming the norm for CIA directors. How likely is it that they have something similar for all other high ranking officials. Of course our officials must become accustomed to being treated like royalty what could be more natural?
I’ve never liked this guy much. I bet he’ll be President one day. Or maybe dictator.
This needs no words.
When dealing with facts about which there is some contention most of the time we can give very simple and clear advice to people. Be skeptical and find the truth on your own. Research. Learn. Analyze. And try to let go of your biases or anything else that might be clouding your judgment. Eventually reasonably intelligent non-biased persons should come to approximately the same opinion as to the facts. They might then draw different conclusions as to what to do about those facts but the facts themselves will not be in doubt.
But as the truths we unearth about the universe become increasingly complex you reach a point where many of the most important facts are beyond the easy comprehension level of a great many people of below average, average, and even above average intellect. Geniuses might be able to grasp these truths quickly but for the rest of us it takes years and years of study and analysis to develop a sound and complete understanding. It has to be a full time job. And nobody has the time to do that.
So then here you are an above average person with some knowledge of a subject and you have experts who claim great knowledge of the subject that you don’t find fully trustworthy telling you something about that subject that if true would necessitate extraordinary measures. Ordinarily you could just dig and dig and dig until you know whether it is true. And some will. But most won’t. Most will dig a little and then draw the conclusion they are predisposed to believe, usually based on the degree to which they trust or do not trust the entities claiming to be experts. Their research then leads them to find evidence to support their bias. And we end up with a war of half formed incomplete ideas being waged by people who lack the expertise and experience needed to understand the complex truths.
I am uncertain about what to do about this and I’m pretty sure it’s one of the forces that is going to one day doom humanity. What bothers me the most about it is that I don’t think these people are acting irrationally in so far as they are simply asking questions. I think they are right to be skeptical and right to question authority. My problem lies I think in the fact that people have become so utterly distrustful of one another and of our institutions that we don’t and won’t acknowledge another person’s expertise no matter how they back it up. And I can’t even say that that is definitely a wrong thing to do considering how much expert-failure we’ve seen in human history and especially in recent years.
But if you refuse to believe everything you haven’t yet fully comprehended and there exists some truths that are extremely complex to the point that it is beyond your ability to quickly or easily comprehend (or maybe even comprehend period), then you will inevitably end up refusing to believe some truths and sometimes those will be very important truths. Sometimes immeasurable human suffering may result from the majority failing to believe in those truths.
Yet we trust our computers our cell phones our hard drives our cars our games and our televisions without full understanding of their inner workings. We don’t doubt them. We don’t refuse to use them until we’ve gone to engineering school and have thirty years of experience so that we’ve mastered every nuance of their inner workings. Surely the same reasoning and methodology that leads to their existence ought to be given some special credence when it projects claims of a more extraordinary and harder to believe nature. So my current reasoning strategy is this: my cell phone works, therefore most things hard scientists are telling me is probably not entirely wrong. In other soft “sciences” however all bets are off.
Space Command Kickstarter
This project sounds cool and I am excited about it. But I mostly want this project to succeed so that it can inspire people to use a similar method to make some Stargate movies one day.
We also know that on the scale of geologic time fucking bullshit happens to our planet periodically. That’s the technical term yes. I don’t want the time to come when scientists come to the world’s governments and say “alright this is it (asteroid, meteor, super volcano, solar flare, alien invasion, super virus, etc) this shit just got real” and everybody says “eh better to deny it cuz then nobody will tell me ‘I told you so’”,
A commonly repeated phrase goes something like this: “Always deny the apocalypse because if you’re wrong no one will be around to tell you ‘I told you so’”.
Haha. Sounds clever. Yay.
Nonsense.
As students of history we know that civilizations have collapsed in the past and will likely collapse again and that those collapses are by and large avoidable. The window to prevent overshoot and collapse is often smaller than we can imagine. No doubt there was someone screaming that the end was Nigh in every single case and some of them were just pulling their opinions out of their arse but some where screaming it for the right reasons. And everybody chose to ignore all of them and maybe some of them ignored the screamers because they preferred to be right then to prevent human suffering. And that’s wrong.
Personally I’d rather be proven wrong by the continued existence of humanity than to see the end come knowing I could have done more to prevent it.
