The best social safety net in the world can only protect you so much from the needs of your own children, absent some sort of young ladies illustrated primer taking over. So in that since parenting becomes more important to parents human thriving when other struggles die.
If you follow Raj Chetty's work on income mobility it appears that single parents in the neighborhood matter a lot more than single parents themselves. Since single parenthood is much more common for black families and our cities tend to be segregated, black kids tend to grow up around single parented kids which is a disadvantage. Basically having two awesome parents doesn't make up for having your entire world be not that. And having a single parent doesn't ruin an upbringing surrounded by people with two parent families. I think it's as much about shared culture as anything, the social norms get established by majority rule basically.
One point of the article is that there's no need for a higher athmospheric pressure to explain pterosaurs flight. It would work fine under the conditions we have today.
"Another major red flag common to all cranks is their frequent comparison between themselves and scientists who received establishment pushback against their ideas - Wegner, Galileo, Darwin and so on."
The article you posted:
"It is admirable how the persistent efforts of a handful of Wegener’s converts were able to overcome the arrogance of the majority." ... "This present article is having a somewhat similar history."
Mark Witton:
"Saving the best until last: yes, unbelievable as it is, there are individuals who suggest mainstream scientists are somehow organising against them to suppress their work. While maybe not imagining something as sinister as the Big Pharma conspiracy, some cranks infer that palaeontology is governed by individuals who dictate what is and what isn't acceptable science, and who forbid the publication of work that challenges the status quo."
The article you posted:
"This paper in its various versions has had a battered history. Here are the journals that were sent this paper and either returned it unread or just discarded it." "It seems that this paper is too radical for today’s journals."
By the way, the article from your link is not by the guy who posted the copy of it on his blog, but by a much older chemist:
Actually a newer “version” by the same chemist who's text was just copy pasted by that Ing. (i.e. Engineer) guy (who names that copy-pasting “A small Tribute”)
That (the newer one, from your link) was published by: “Chemical innovation 30 (12), 50-55, 2000”
Compare with the peer reviewed, not confirming "many times higher pressure" claim:
"We show from the analysis of nitrogen and argon isotopes in fluid inclusions trapped in 3.0- to 3.5-billion-year-old hydrothermal quartz that the partial pressure of N2 of the Archean atmosphere was lower than 1.1 bar, possibly as low as 0.5 bar, and had a nitrogen isotopic composition comparable to the present-day one. These results imply that dinitrogen did not play a significant role in the thermal budget of the ancient Earth and that the Archean partial pressure of CO2 was probably lower than 0.7 bar."
There is sure possibility that the pressure changed through the times, but not alk “proofs” are real proofs.
Yeah. The assumption that the Earth's environment parameters have been stable for billions of years is bunk. (Especially ironic if the person is railing about 'global warming' at the same time.)
Implicit in your sentence is however an assumption that there was any life comparable to today's during the "billions of years" which is false. More than just 500 million years ago there were not even plants on the land:
So it's simply wrong mentioning "billions of years" when humans worry for the environment in which they can live while depending on it.
For most of the "billions" of years on Earth, there wasn't anything on land, and the "life" in oceans was not something we understand as today's life, and the environment could not support our life (as in, there was not even enough oxygen!). The Earth started to "resemble its present state" only less than 400 million years ago:
Luckily, everybody can see what you have actually written before. The "18th century idea of uniformitarianism" was definitely not your main problem there, rather the much more recent developments.
I suspect "know the right answer" is
"my institution is too bureaucratic to actually implement obvious right things"
"managers don't listen"
"I think I know what I'm talking about, but I don't see above my little serfdom and upper level decisions look weird from here"
"I'm a prideful jerk with strong opinions"
Wilson in his speech asking for American involvement in the war cited the injustice of submarine warfare more than anything, so I agree this point at least seems to fall flat.
German submarine warfare upset the US because they sank some US shipping at considerable loss of life, rather than because of any inherent moral flaw. Had they steered clear of civilian shipping (trickier than it sounds because some military ships disguised themselves as merchant marine vessels) or at least avoided sinking anything that was likely to belong to the US, things might have turned out very differently.
Moral arguments in political speeches should not be taken at face value, since their inclusion is for emotional arousal rather than reasoned analysis.
I think a reasonable metaphor for thinking about this issue is to consider a grocery store, where is aisle represents a different kind of income and each store represents a different country. If prices get too high in one aisle, shoppers that spend a lot of time in that aisle will switch stores if they can afford the drive. It seems like both people and politicians tend to focus on the "earned income" aisle because that's what people are familiar with. That serves as a nice area for politicking because they can "tax the wealthy" without actually hitting the real donors in any meaningful way since most of their income comes from other sources. At the same time corporations and high net worth individuals are more than capable of leaving, hence the double-irish, etc. If they go, tax revenues go to 0 rather than small, so it would seem to be in the strategic interest of the United States government (assuming we want to maximize revenue which is probably not the goal but will work for this purpose) to be the lowest tax domicile for that kind of income, but just barely. That way we attract wealthy individuals but still "extract" the maximum feasible wealth from them. I really don't like the adversarial nature of this kind of thinking, but you have to at least admit that people are corporations do venue shop. If that's not brought up at all, someone's being naiive, or more likely, disingenuous.
You "only" need about 650m elevation if you place an equally tall tower at both places. Sadly neither Key West nor Havana has any tall mountains nearby either
If I find myself being convinced by the argument, does that mean I should adopt Epistemic learned helplessness in response or not adopt Epistemic learned helplessness in response?
I'm partly being facetious, but it would be interesting to try to use a non-argumentative approach to persuade to use one, I'm just not exactly sure what that would look like.
As a kid I remember being told "brush your teeth in circles, it's better" and thinking "I'm sure something else will be recommended in ten years so I'm just going to go back and forth horizontally like I want to" and sure enough circles clean more plaque but push your gums up so downward flicks were recommended. Maybe a dentist can weigh in on current tooth brushing practice... That said, was I better off with my inferior method? That's kind of the crux of it. If we're blown about by every plausible theory, is that better than being blown about by nothing? It seems like this is a nested Bayesian decision problem that needs to incorporate switching costs, which I'd guess for some things are trivial and for other things are quite large.
If you try to rapidly see and comprehend an ultimate truth head-on, you pay the price of only being able to think about and express such truths in forms which look insane to outsiders(terrorism, fascism, conspiracy theory, etc.) and with correspondingly drastic consequences to the well-being of you and others.
But if you want to live a healthy, ordinary life, you shade yourself from some of those truths, knowingly or not. You express them cryptically and meditate on them in a deliberately obfuscated way, or dismiss them for the moment. You do not allow that knowledge to throw you around. That doesn't mean that you don't act on the knowledge at all(which is how epistemic learned helplessness is presented here), so much as it does that you can proceed to find paths to acting on it that are indirect and do not trip your insanity alarms.
Culture itself demonstrates this property. It changes rapidly enough, but it does so gradually, most of the time. Reality in the year 1985 meant something recognizable yet quite a bit different - in food, fashion, and music, in cultural attitudes, politics, and should-you-says, and in everyday usage of time and activities. Some of the things that were taken seriously then are dismissed now, and some of the things that were laughable then are taken very seriously now. And in the 30 years that transpired, many of the same people are still around, but nearly all have changed their status and outlook in some way. Many have led reasonably content lives while doing so. Isn't that amazing?
I've thought down these paths a lot, and I came to similar but different conclusion. It's not simply that I don't trust argument - I weight arguments with evidence.
If you take the simulation argument for instance - if you're contemplating the probability that we are living in a lifelike simulation you must factor in the number of lifelike simulations you have seen.
>> you must factor in the number of lifelike simulations you have seen
Right. I take the position that there are problems that are unsolvable by technology; simulating the universe seems likely to be in that category. That position is fundamentally unprovable, but call it a hunch. Also, Occam's Razor argues against it, FWIW.
Yes the full simulation probability has to be something like the probability simulations are possible and the probability that simulations have been discovered and the probability that simulations are numerous and the probability that simulations are 'unaware' times the then (n-1) in n probability that you are in a simulation. The size of the (n-1) in n part of the probability is pretty irrelevant vs the other parts.
It's hard to make a compelling argument for why a particular problem will never be solved. However, I think it's a reasonable supposition that such unsolvable problems exist. Resurrecting the dead, for instance. In order to faithfully simulate the universe, you'd apparently need complete understanding of the laws of physics. And, you'd probably need a tremendously large (and presumably very power-hungry) computer to run the simulation. There's no particular reason to think that physics will ever be completely understood, and the computer might need more power than all the stars in the universe can supply.
Again, it's extremely difficult to argue compellingly for why something can't be solved: even if it seems to be ruled out by known laws of physics (like traveling faster than light), you can always argue that new laws will be found someday that will be more favorable than the current ones. That argument never terminates, because you don't know what you don't know.
Interesting that you still accepted without question that brushing at all was important. You didn't simply say "well then, who can know?" and quit brushing altogether.
I've been thinking lately that "do the best that your intuition can" is the optimal way to solve these sorts of mini tasks. That way, when your intuition is right about 10,000 things in your life, you have a bit of leeway with the other 10,000 it's wrong about.
I'd imagine that this really only works as long as your intuition is in constant check, though.
I like this heuristic, since for things for which it is effective, intuition basically _is_ rationality, on a species-level timescale. The problem is the things for which it is not effective. The other problem is knowing which kind of thing you're dealing with, since determining that requires intuition.
If you're looking to shed weight ASAP without undercutting the future of the organization, HR is an easy target. Maybe not wise, but you can understand how executives could come to the decision to cut HR before Engineering, for example.
Also, I'd imagine at least some of the decline is for the same reason we've seen decline in lots of other sectors -- HR processes are some of the easier ones to automate (no robotics, often tasks are fairly well defined)
Groupon has lots of debt, just not the long-term kind. Why is having debt due sooner somehow better? For reference check out this http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=1490281&ac... their current assets and current liabilities are about the same, with cash and what they owe their merchants about the same too.
That said, I always teach Groupon as the quintessential example of the power of having a negative payables cycle. They don't deserve any laughter for the growth engine they created; whether the business itself is sustainable is still an open question, but I'd say the same thing about GM so that comment doesn't really count as derision.
When Amazon launched, the standard contracts between publishers and bookstores had the stores paying 60 days after books were shipped to them. This made sense for conventional bookstores which would often have books on their shelves for months before selling them; but Amazon typically turned over their inventory every 30 days, meaning that -- even after the inevitable delay between charging a credit card and getting the money -- they received payment for books on average 2-3 weeks before they had to pay their suppliers. A lot of Amazon's early growth was funded by this negative working capital requirement.
Now that Amazon has expanded from books into CDs and DVDs and electronics and clothing and toys and food and computing services, of course, it's quite possible that their cash flow picture is very different.
