Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently:

• Neil deGrasse Tyson Slammed For Dismissing Philosophy As 'Useless'

  On a recent episode of the Nerdist podcast, Neil deGrasse Tyson dismissed philosophy as a useless enterprise, advising students to avoid it. It's not the first time he's made such remarks, prompting biologist and philosopher Massimo Pigliucci to write a must-read response.

• Uber and Airbnb Are Waging a Libertarian War on Regulators

  First, companies like Airbnb have honed in on parts of the economy where powerful regulators have traditionally deterred new entrants. Second, and largely as a result, the upstarts must not only innovate with their technology and business strategy, but also when dealing with the government officials who control their fate.

• Munk Debates

  A Canadian charitable initiative established in 2008

  Two panelists argue for a debate style motion and two against. The format is short opening statements followed by a civil and substantive moderated panel discussion, followed by short closing statements.

• Is Israel an Apartheid State? (Jeffrey Goldberg)

• Dollars for Docs

  How Industry Dollars Reach Your Doctors

  In recent years, drug companies have started releasing details of the payments they make to doctors and other health professionals for promotional talks, research and consulting. As of 2012, 15 companies published the information, most because of legal settlements. Use this tool to search for payments.

• 9 Simple Statements That Will Make You Think Differently About the World
  1. how deceiving common sense can be
  2. the importance of personality
  3. wages in rich countries are determined more by immigration control than anything else
  4. the faster things change, the less reliable forecasts are
  5. [the] worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time
  6. having control of your time is the only reasonable financial goal
  7. skills grow just like compound interest, with one generation leveraging the talents of the last

  8. the brain is designed with blind spots, and one of its cleverest tricks is to confer on us the comforting delusion that we, personally, do not have any

  9. two Australian surgeons found that half of the facts in that field also become false every forty-five years

• Over the Hill? Cognitive Speeds Peak at Age 24

  The study is limited by the fact that it only focused on video game players.

• Brain Injury Turns Man Into Math Genius

  The injury, while devastating, seems to have unlocked part of his brain that makes everything in his world appear to have a mathematical structure.

• Peculiar Traits of Rich People
  • They are (mostly pleasant) sociopaths
  • They care about time periods most can't comprehend
  • They don't give a damn what you think of them

• Medicare Payments to Providers in 2012

  Data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, shows the dollar amounts that doctors and other medical providers received in Medicare reimbursements in 2012, along with other data including their specialties.

• The '77 Cents on the Dollar' Myth About Women's Pay

  Once education, marital status and occupations are considered, the 'gender wage gap' all but disappears.

Some recent links on how Obama dealt (or did not deal) with Wall Street.

• The Buck Stops With Obama on Tepid Financial Reform

  Favored Obama appointees seem to share certain qualities: They work within the system, they don't like to ruffle feathers or pick fights, and they keep their profiles low. They are technocrats.

• Why Won't Washington Take on Wall Street's Biggest Crimes?

  The Justice Department has successfully convicted dozens of bankers for insider trading. But the big banks did something much worse and got away with it.

  But what many of us want to know is: why, immediately after the most severe financial crisis in more than seventy years, which resulted in the loss of almost nine million jobs, did the Justice Department choose to train its heavy artillery on insider traders? Sure, insider trading is bad. It's very rich people cheating to make themselves extravagantly rich. It should be illegal, and people should go to jail for it. But it's far from the biggest thing wrong with our financial markets and institutions.

• Geithner is trying to rewrite history in new book

  In other words, the deal Geithner is now lauding required that interest rates remain unnaturally low for six years and counting. And those low rates cost American savers many, many times the amount of money the government made on its bank deals.

There is one thing that seems obvious to me but most scientists disagree. Namely that the human brain cannot understand everything about the world we live in. Not just because we haven't figured it out yet, but because our brains are a product of evolution. Since most agree that other mammals, even those with large brains, cannot understand the world as humans do, isn't it presumptuous to think some species won't come after us that makes us look similarly dumb?

So I was happy to see on Edge.org, in a response to it's question of the year for 2014: What Scientific Idea Is Ready For Retirement? by Martin Rees one of the world's leading astronomers and cosmologists:

We'll Never Hit Barriers To Scientific Understanding     (NOT)

It begins,

There's a widely-held presumption that our insight will deepen indefinitely -- that all scientific problems will eventually yield to attack. But I think we may need to abandon this optimism. The human intellect may hit the buffers -- even though in most fields of science, there's surely a long way to go before this happens.

And ends with,

We humans haven't changed much since our remote ancestors roamed the African savannah. Our brains evolved to cope with the human-scale environment. So it is surely remarkable that we can make sense of phenomena that confound everyday intuition: in particular, the minuscule atoms we're made of, and the vast cosmos that surrounds us.

Nonetheless -- and here I'm sticking my neck out -- maybe some aspects of reality are intrinsically beyond us, in that their comprehension would require some post-human intellect -- just as Euclidean geometry is beyond non-human primates.
. . .

It would be unduly anthropocentric to believe that all of science -- and a proper concept of all aspects of reality -- is within human mental powers to grasp. Whether the really long-range future lies with organic post-humans or with intelligent machines is a matter for debate -- but either way, there will be insights into reality left for them to discover.

That is just the way I see it.