Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
-Novelist, Philosopher, and Public Intellectual-
I've known mathematical geniuses who are dunces when it comes to the kind of imaginative intelligence that goes into interpreting works of art--or, for that matter, interpreting people. I've met brilliant novelists whose deductive talents aren't sufficient to get them through an elementary course in symbolic logic. I have an appreciation for sundry forms of smartness, though there are characteristics other than smartness that I value far more in people. Too many people who are celebrated for their intellectual or artistic talents think that their gifts license them to be jerks. What I call "talentism," the conviction that those with extraordinary abilities matter more than other people, is as faulty a normative proposition as any other that regards some people as mattering more than others--such as sexism, racism, classism, ableism, lookism, ageism, nationalism, imperialism, and hetero-normativity.
Dear "Skeptics," Bash Homeopathy and Bigfoot Less, Mammograms and War More
John Horgan (Scientific American blog) on May 16, 2016
I'm a science journalist. I don't celebrate science, I criticize it,
because science needs critics more than cheerleaders.
I point out gaps between scientific hype and reality.
That keeps me busy, because, as you know,
most peer-reviewed scientific claims are wrong.
...
Meanwhile, you neglect what I call hard targets. These are
dubious and even harmful claims promoted by major scientists and
institutions. In the rest of this talk, I'll give you examples
of hard targets from physics, medicine and biology. I'll wrap up
with a rant about war, the hardest target of all.
Jeffrey Snider - October 21, 2016
It changes none of this emotion that central banks have already
admitted implicitly that it was all a lie. If QE had been such a
success establishing how all these warnings are misconstruing what
are really good times, then why are central banks everywhere quietly
but very seriously evaluating only other options? The answer is,
for once, refreshingly simple: faith in central banks among market
participants is at a low, while faith in central banks in the media
and mainstream remains largely (but not totally) undaunted. Central
bankers in their vanity care much about the latter, but for their
survival are finally forced to deal with the former.
...
What all these have in common is more than just interest rates
or TED spreads, even global depression; it is the entire idea of
technocracy itself. Since before Plato, people have dreamed of a
utopia where enlightened, dispassionate philosophers would govern and
guide messy, often awful human existence toward and into "optimum"
outcomes. It took until "economics" in the latter half of the 20th
century for such hubris to take literal hold; there is an entire
branch of the "science" dedicated through statistics just so to
determining both "optimal outcomes" as well as the duty to "nudge"
people toward them using the power of government if need be.
The Economist - Oct 1st 2016
But China's accession to the WTO caused a big shock. The
country's size, and the speed at which it conquered rich-world
markets for low-cost manufacturing, makes it unique. By 2013 it
had captured one-fifth of all manufacturing exports worldwide,
compared with a share of only 2% in 1991.
...
Still, when David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), David Dorn of the University of Zurich and Gordon Hanson of
the University of California, San Diego, looked into the job losses
more closely, they found something worrying. At least one-fifth of
the drop in factory jobs during that period was the direct result
of competition from China.
...
Still, some rich countries, such as Germany, Britain and Canada,
have done rather better than America at keeping prime-age men in
work, though others, including France, Italy and Spain, have done
even worse. That is partly a matter of policy. Members of the OECD,
a club of mostly rich countries, set aside an average of 0.6% of
GDP a year for "active labour-market policies"--job centres,
retraining schemes and employment subsidies--to ease the transition
to new types of work. America spends just 0.1% of GDP. By neglecting
those whose jobs have been swallowed by technology or imports,
America's policymakers have fuelled some of the anger about
freer trade.
...
A study by Pablo Fajgelbaum of the University of California, Los
Angeles, and Amit Khandelwal, of Columbia University, suggests
that in an average country, people on high incomes would lose 28%
of their purchasing power if borders were closed to trade. But the
poorest 10% of consumers would lose 63% of their spending power,
because they buy relatively more imported goods. The authors find
a bias of trade in favour of poorer people in all 40 countries in
their study, which included 13 developing countries.
New research suggests that dietary calcium in the form of supplements,
but not calcium-rich foods, might have a harmful impact on the heart.
...
"But our study adds to the body of evidence that excess calcium
in the form of supplements may harm the heart and vascular system,"
Michos said in a news release from Johns Hopkins University School
of Medicine in Baltimore.
Big cities healthier? Having sidewalks to walk on and access to parks and good public transport makes for happier city residents, a new survey says.
With more opportunities to exercise, walk and stay outdoors, the report finds, residents also tend to smoke less and find the housing "ideal" for individuals and families alike. It's a trend that can be observed in a number of cities, such as Seattle and Minneapolis, where young families are choosing to forego suburbs for downtown housing despite having less space.
The fundamental reason why Haldane, Kosterlitz and Thouless needed
to do what they did is that they're working in a subfield where the
simple and straightforwardly reductionist approach that characterizes
physics seems to run into trouble.
...
One of the biggest of these is the subfield of "condensed
matter," which tries to study the properties of vast assemblages
of atoms making up solid or liquid systems. In condensed-matter
systems you're worried about the collective behavior of many
more particles than you have any hope of counting. As Phillip
Anderson pointed out in a famous paper from 1972, these collective
behaviors aren't necessarily obvious, even when the underlying
rules governing the interactions between particles are simple
and well-understood. More is different, in Anderson's phrase,
but more importantly, more is difficult.