Lethal questions

From a tweet, Thomas Sowell presents three questions which he claims most leftist propositions fail to address.

1. Compared to what? 2. At what cost? 3. What hard evidence do you have?

 I do not disagree.

But these three questions are actually a pretty good filter for most propositions of any origin.  It is true that the left have more fabulist thinking and therefore the questions are especially lethal to their imaginings but that is a consequence of bad thinking.

Sowell is a marvelous communicator and part of his effectiveness is his pithiness.  I would muddy the waters by expanding the list to make it more accurate.  Sacrificing succinctness for precision.

1. Compared to what? 

2. At what cost to whom? 

3. For what benefit for whom? 

4. What hard evidence do you have?

5. How confident can you be in the causal mechanisms? 

6. With what probability of success?

 

The epistemic cycle of life

 I enjoyed this three person meme when I first saw it a year or more ago.  Since then it has proved astonishingly versatile with a near universal capacity to illustrate realities we ignore.

Love this epistemic cycle of life.

Click to enlarge.

History

Over 90% of the soldiers who fought WW2 in Europe fought on the Eastern front. pic.twitter.com/I4yss4m2jn

— Weird History (@weird_hist) July 31, 2020

Academia are always ready with ideas to harness and control their fellow citizens.

 From Academics Are Really, Really Worried About Their Freedom by John McWhorter.  I cannot wait till when we can wake from this nightmare of racist, divisive, violent, coercive ideological bigots that is wokedom, postmodernism, critical theory.   McWhorter reports from the front lines of the university just how far the disease has spread.

Extreme Parado

 From The 1 % of the population accountable for 63 % of all violent crime  convictions by Örjan Falk et al.  From the Abstract:

Population-based studies on violent crime and background factors may provide an understanding of the relationships between susceptibility factors and crime. We aimed to determine the distribution of violent crime convictions in the Swedish population 1973–2004 and to identify criminal, academic, parental, and psychiatric risk factors for persistence in violent crime.

[snip]

A total of 93,642 individuals (3.9 %) had at least one violent conviction. The distribution of convictions was highly skewed; 24,342 persistent violent offenders (1.0 % of the total population) accounted for 63.2 % of all convictions. Persistence in violence was associated with male sex (OR 2.5), personality disorder (OR 2.3), violent crime conviction before age 19 (OR 2.0), drug-related offenses (OR 1.9), nonviolent criminality (OR 1.9), substance use disorder (OR 1.9), and major mental disorder (OR 1.3). 

[snip]

The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality.

Farmyard at Dusk, c. 1965 by Ronald Lampitt

Farmyard at Dusk, c. 1965 by Ronald Lampitt

Click to enlarge.

An insight

Societies largely adhere to Tolstoy’s principle of families: the happy ones are all quite similar because there are only a few ways to be a happy society, and the miserable ones are all suffer in different ways because there are many, many ways to be a miserable society.

— Bo Winegard (@EPoe187) August 2, 2020

Data Talks

 This map shows 19th century shipping paths, taken from the weather logs of 523 American ships. Note the whalers traveling to the west coast of South America. Much more from the creator on how this was collected and what we can learn from it, here: https://t.co/HOyPb4NoPL pic.twitter.com/qWRd1WUxvh

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) August 1, 2020

I see wonderful things

Slow-motion woodpecker. Woodpeckers have various adaptations that allow them to avoid injury despite bashing their faces into trees thousands of times a day. These include thick, spongy skulls that protect their brains and specialized, protective eyelids. https://t.co/IaWlmHXAaa pic.twitter.com/UTo7z4mAwe

— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) August 3, 2020

Offbeat Humor

It took all of human history up to 1905 to get to e=mc2 but only around 100 years to fall back to 2+2=5.

— The Stoic (@StoicMDJ) August 2, 2020