IT’S EARLY STAGE CAPITALISM IN AMERICA’S YOUTH:

How Nigh Is the End? Predictions for Geysers, Marriages, Poker Streaks and the Human Race (John Tierney, July 16, 2007, NY Times Tierney Lab)

Imagine you have just landed on another planet and entered Geyser Intergalactic Park. You know nothing about geysers except that they sometimes start shooting liquid and sometimes stop. You see two active geysers, each with a digital stopwatch next to it recording how long it’s been shooting. One geyser has been shooting for 100 million years. The other has been shooting for 10 seconds.

Can you predict which of these geysers will stop first?

You may think there’s an easy answer, but it’s not so clear to the philosophers and probability experts who have been debating the predictions of J. Richard Gott III, the Princeton physicist whom I discuss in my Findings column. He says you can make forecasts with 95-percent certainty about the likely longevity of the human race – or your marriage, or your winning streak at the poker table — simply by looking at how long it has existed. The longer something’s been around, the longer he expects it to last.

By that logic, you should expect the 10-second geyser to stop first, but it’s not so simple, as Bradley Monton and Brian Kierland explain in an excellent article in the Philosophical Quarterly. These philosophers – at the University of Colorado and the University of Missouri, respectively – took a long look at the debate over Dr. Gott’s forecasting method.

Dr. Gott’s Copernican Formula assumes that whatever you’re observing is unlikely to still be in the first one-fortieth of its lifespan, so if it’s already been around for x amount of time, it’s unlikely to last an additional 39x amount of time. Conversely, it’s probably not very close to its demise — – it’s probably still in the first 39/40 of its total lifespan, not in the final 1/40 — so you can predict that its remaining life is likely to be at least 1/39th of x.

Dr. Gott applied his formula to the plays and musicals that were open on Broadway the day his original paper was published in Nature in 1993. Of the 44 Broadway productions, 40 have closed within the forecast limits (including “Cats,” then being advertised as “now and forever.”) Depending on what happens with the remaining four – none is yet near its upper limit – Dr. Gott’s accuracy rate will be somewhere between 90 and 100 percent, which jibes nicely with the 95-percent accuracy rate that his formula is supposed to yield.

Human extinction could come within 5,100 years (Christopher Ingraham, October 16, 2017, Washington Post)

Every day, it seems, brings with it fresh new horrors. Mass murder. Catastrophic climate change. Nuclear annihilation. It’s all enough to make a reasonable person ask: How much longer can things go on this way? A Princeton University astrophysicist named J. Richard Gott has a surprisingly precise answer to that question.

Assuming that you and I are not so special as to be born at either the dawn of a very long-lasting human civilization or the twilight years of a short-lived one, we can apply Gott’s 95 percent confidence formula to arrive at an estimate of when the human race will go extinct: between 5,100 and 7.8 million years from now.

COMMON SENSE IS CONSERVATIVE:

A Common Sense Democrat manifesto: Where do we go from here? (Matthew Yglesias, Nov 12, 2024, Slow Boring)

Nine principles for Common Sense Democrats

Over the next few weeks, I’ll share posts elaborating on each one individually, but in the meantime, these are the principles I’d like to see the Democratic party embrace:

Economic self-interest for the working class includes both robust economic growth and a robust social safety net.

The government should prioritize maintaining functional public systems and spaces over tolerating anti-social behavior.

Climate change — and pollution more broadly — is a reality to manage, not a hard limit to obey.

We should, in fact, judge people by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin, rejecting discrimination and racial profiling without embracing views that elevate anyone’s identity groups over their individuality.

Race is a social construct, but biological sex is not. Policy must acknowledge that reality and uphold people’s basic freedom to live as they choose.

Academic and nonprofit work does not occupy a unique position of virtue relative to private business or any other jobs.

Politeness is a virtue, but obsessive language policing alienates most people and degrades the quality of thinking.

Public services and institutions like schools deserve adequate funding, and they must prioritize the interests of their users, not their workforce or abstract ideological projects.

All people have equal moral worth, but democratic self-government requires the American government to prioritize the interests of American citizens.

YEAH, BUT OTHER THAN THAT…:

Science and Bias (Kali Jerrard, October 22, 2024, MAS)

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has published the fourth and final report in the Shifting Sands project, Unsound Science and Unsafe Regulation, Zombie Psychology, Implicit Association Test. Through statistical analyses, this report finds that the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a test which is used as a metric in the implicit bias theory—and utilized by scientists, government, researchers, and others—has no scientific foundation.

For years, NAS has warned of the dangers of the irreproducibility crisis and its bearing on the spread of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and other race-based ideologies throughout higher education, science, and even government. Each of the four reports in the Shifting Sands project address the effects of the irreproducibility crisis on public policy, specifically “how flawed science has underwritten costly policies that undermine liberty.” But what exactly is the “irreproducibility crisis”? For those unfamiliar, irreproducible science occurs when an original study cannot be reproduced with the same results. The irreproducibility crisis occurs when regulations and public policy are swayed or influenced by science and studies which cannot be reproduced with statistically significant results.

Logically, government policies should be guided by sound science, especially when dealing with sensitive subjects like race, sex, and gender. But logic has taken a proverbial hike.

For all four Shifting Sands reports, the authors utilized p-value plotting to demonstrate the weaknesses in government use of meta-analyses. Policymakers and scientists alike use statistical analyses as a means to an end—achieving statistically significant results are useful when arguing for changes to policy and regulation. Oftentimes, these analyses are skewed. False-positive, statistically significant results abound. Why are these results so common? Why is unsound science pervading policy, especially antidiscrimination law? And why should we care?

ECONOMICS TRUMPS IDEOLOGY:

He’ll try, but Trump can’t stop the clean energy revolution (Matt Simon, Nov 11, 2024, Grist)

A core irony of climate change is that markets incentivized the wide-scale burning of fossil fuels beginning in the Industrial Revolution, creating the mess humanity is mired in, and now those markets are driving the Green Revolution that will help fix it. Coal, oil, and gas are commodities whose prices fluctuate. As natural resources that humans pull from the ground, there’s really no improving on them — engineers can’t engineer new versions of coal.

By contrast, solar panels, wind turbines, and appliances like induction stoves only get better — more efficient and cheaper — with time. Energy experts believe solar power, the price of which fell 90 percent between 2010 and 2020, will continue to proliferate across the landscape. (Last year, the United States added three times as much solar capacity as natural gas.) Heat pumps now outsell gas furnaces in the U.S., due in part to government incentives. Last year, Maine announced it had reached its goal of installing 100,000 heat pumps two years ahead of schedule, in part thanks to state rebates.

AFPI V. HERITAGE

Trump Loves Her. His Allies Don’t Trust Her. (Ian Ward, 10/25/24, POLITICO)

Among the nationalist-populist wing of the GOP, Rollins and her allies at AFPI are viewed as the rump faction of the old Republican establishment, dedicated to preserving the pre-Trump political orthodoxy that prioritizes free trade, deregulation, business-friendly economic policies and an expansive role for the U.S. on the global stage. During her stint in the Trump White House — which Rollins joined in 2018 as director of the little-known Office of American Innovation before becoming acting director of the Domestic Policy Council in 2020 — Rollins allied herself with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was widely viewed as the leader of the White House’s more centrist and corporatist faction. With Kushner’s support, Rollins elevated criminal justice reform as a major issue within the Trump White House, putting her at odds with Trump’s more hardline advisers.

“She is a Bush conservative,” said a former Trump administration official, who was granted anonymity to discuss their experience working with Rollins. “She’s an unrepentant H.W. [Bush], Rick Perry [conservative] — that’s her ideology.”

This report is based on information from an extensive review of Rollins’ public statements, dozens of conversations with insiders and a half dozen interviews with people who have worked directly with Rollins — including some of her closest allies — most of whom agreed to be interviewed as long as they were not identified by name because of Rollins’ growing influence. In a written statement, a spokesperson for AFPI declined to comment directly on whether she would accept the chief of staff position and emphasized Rollins’ loyalty to Trump, writing, “In an administration where the weakly committed did not last, Brooke was on the team until the very end of term one.” A spokesperson for the Trump transition responded to a set of questions about Rollins’ role with a generic statement saying that “formal discussions about who will serve in a second Trump Administration is [sic] premature.”

To a degree, AFPI’s plans for a second Trump administration reflect Rollins’ more conventional orientation. Although the group’s policy agenda flicks at Trump-y issues like restricting immigration and “draining the swamp,” the bulk of its policy plans are devoted to traditional Republican priorities like slashing government regulation, extending business-friendly tax cuts and pursuing a foreign policy based around the Reaganite mandate of “peace through strength.” AFPI’s roster of staffers and advisers also reflects Rollins’ more pre-Trump leanings: Kudlow is a self-avowed proponent of free trade who has expressed skepticism about Trump’s more aggressive trade and tariff policies, and Chad Wolf, executive director of AFPI and the former acting director of the Department of Homeland Security under Trump, is viewed by some conservatives as a less effective advocate for immigration restriction than hardline Trump aides like Stephen Miller.

WHAT COMES NEXT?:

PODCAST: Trump’s Triumph (w/ Ian Ward) (Know Your Enemy)

As the reality of Donald Trump’s decisive victory sets in, we wanted to talk to Politico’s Ian Ward, who’s done some of the very best reporting on post-liberal intellectuals, JD Vance, and MAGA-world, in addition to spending time on the campaign trail this fall. After breaking down the results of the presidential election, we discuss Vance’s role in the campaign, his standing with Trump, and friendship with Don Jr.; how the Trump transition is taking shape and who’s likely to influence his decisions at the start of his second term; whether Project 2025 will actually be implemented; if the Republican Party will actually govern in a pro-worker way; and much more!

Really interesting look at the election from the Left, because honest and self-reflective. Some features are a look at how infighting will cripple the Administration again and whether Democrats are destined to become the conservative party because the base is educated, affluent and owns property.

SECRET LAWS:

Freedom and the Lawmakers: A Book Review of Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law, by Neil Gorsuch and Janie Nitze (Alberto Mingardi, EconLib)

Gorsuch and Nitze provide some figures of the paper blizzard sweeping over Washington, D.C. “Less than a hundred years ago, all of the federal government’s statutes fit into a single volume. By 2018 the U.S. Code encompasses 54 volumes and approximately 60,000 pages. Over the last decade, Congress has adopted an average of 344 new pieces of legislation each session. That amounts to about 2 or 3 million words of new federal law each year.” Agencies “publish their proposals and final rules in the Federal Register; their final regulations can also be found in the Code of Federal Regulations. When the Federal Register started in 1936, it was 16 pages long. In recent years, that publication has grown by an average of more than 70,000 pages annually. Meanwhile, by 2021 the Code of Federal Regulations spanned about 200 volumes and over 188,000 pages.” And “not only have our laws grown rapidly in recent years… so have the punishments they carry.”

IT’S NOT MAGIC, IT’S PALMYRA:

What makes baseball’s “magic mud” so special?: It has just the right mix of spreadability, stickiness, and friction to give pitchers a better grip on the ball. (Jennifer Ouellette, Nov 7, 2024, Ars Technica)

In the first experiment, the authors smeared the mud between two plates and then rotated them, measuring the changes in viscosity with a rheometer. In the second, they used an atomic force microscope to peer at the atomic structure of the material to learn more about what makes it sticky. The third experiment required a bit of ingenuity in terms of building the apparatus. They mounted pieces of mudded baseball leather on acrylic base plates and then lowered a ball to contact the surface. At first, they used a steel ball, but it didn’t have the same elastic properties as human skin. So they made their own ball out of PDMS, carefully tuned to the same elasticity, and coated it with synthetic squalene to mimic the secretion of sebum on the fingers by human oil glands.

Pradeep et al. found that magic mud’s particles are primarily silt and clay, with a bit of sand and organic material. The stickiness comes from the clay, silt, and organic matter, while the sand makes it gritty. So the mud “has the properties of skin cream,” they wrote. “This allows it to be held in the hand like a solid but also spread easily to penetrate pores and make a very thin coating on the baseball.”

When the mud dries on the baseball, however, the residue left behind is not like skin cream. That’s due to the angular sand particles bonded to the baseball by the clay, which can increase surface friction by as much as a factor of two. Meanwhile, the finer particles double the adhesion. “The relative proportions of cohesive particulates, frictional sand, and water conspire to make a material that flows like skin cream but grips like sandpaper,” they wrote.

WHEN JOE STEPPED ASIDE THEY NEEDED TO NOMINATE A GOVERNOR:

It’s the economy, stupid: The US election was another reminder of people’s biggest political priority (Elliot Keck, 8 November, 2024, The Critic)

.The Trump campaign placed the Biden-Harris administration’s failed economic record at the centre of its messaging, but looking around the world and indeed looking at home, this approach was far from unique.

This is something that Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and effectively Starmer’s number two, picked up on in his broadcast round on Thursday morning. When asked for his analysis about the US election, McFadden drew on his own experience as part of the project to “change” the Labour party post-2019 and ultimately win power. As he put it “we had a real focus on living standards and how people felt, and the question ‘are you better off than you were four years ago’… was actually one that we posed during the election.”

That relentless focus on what Labour dubbed a “Tory cost of living crisis” and “Tory tax rises” certainly delivered a decisive victory. And while Conservatives may not want to hear this, the Labour opposition arguably had a more sophisticated and holistic understanding of what a cost of living crisis feels like than the Sunak government.

Whereas Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt twice pulled the lever of tax cuts on pay slips through the two 2p cuts on national insurance and waited for gratitude that never arrived, Labour recognised that actually it wasn’t just in payslips where people felt the impact. It was mortgage costs driven by higher interest rates, rental costs due to the failure to build, inflation driven by the covid spending binge and more, all compounded by the perception of significant government waste and failing public services. Most barely noticed the national insurance cuts.

THERE’S A REASON WE ARE THE ELITE:

What if the liberal elites are right? (Matthew Parris, November 8, 2024, The Spectator)

It’s time we stopped patronizing populists by cooing that we’re sorry we didn’t listen and will henceforward do our best to “address their concerns.” We should treat them as the adults they are, and tell them, man to man, that their concerns cannot be met. In countries like America, where money, talent and ambition gravitate towards clusters where success breeds success, we cannot realistically level-up with scarce public funds when the Treasury’s cupboard is bare.

In a national workforce where whole sectors of the economy are critically short of workers to fill jobs we must either import labor (immigration), hoist wages to a level that attracts native workers (inflation and higher taxation) or starve the health, social care, farming and service sectors of workers (ruination). We can keep out imports at a stroke, but prices will rise and our own exporters will face reprisals.

Actually, we do know better.