From an early age, my life’s goal was to get at “the truth.” There were only two obvious career paths: Science, or investigative journalism. I went the first route, becoming an academic researcher. Proud of the path I chose, and always admiring the other one.
This is a companion piece to “Enough: Toward A Sustainable Economics” https://www.science20.com/fred_phillips/enough_toward_a_sustainable_eco….
Jobs. Gates. Berners-Lee. They opened our worlds to wonders: Graphical user interfaces, PCs, the World Wide Web. They were my heroes, and probably yours, deservedly so.
The Israel-Gaza war touched off chaos on U.S. campuses. In a dramatic but frustrating session, a Congressional panel grilled the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn about their policies on student speech and behavior. Asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) whether advocating genocide would be a violation of university policy, Harvard’s president answered, “It can be, depending on the context.”
We're no longer surprised that so many people bow down to the
Invisible Hand of economics, worshipping its messenger coins and notes,
and attending its oracles, the Wall Street analysts. Adam Smith, the
18th-century originator of the invisible hand metaphor, took pains to
affirm its workings should be tempered by moral considerations and
should not be interpreted as the will of God. Those emphases have been
lost.
And back at home, Congressman John Curtis (R Utah) tells National Public Radio that the “conservative climate caucus,” which he chairs, seeks climate solutions that “don’t demonize fossil fuels.”*Now, as many of you know, I’m a political centrist at heart, but because the country has drifted so far to the right, I’ve resolved to be a knee-jerk leftist – a flaming liberal, a yellow dog Democrat – until things come back into balance.
Count the times the word “culture” came out of reporters’ mouths last week, and you’d think they were anthropologists. Usually in this context: “The culture of white supremacy has gone fully mainstream.* “The bedrock idea uniting right-wing communities… is that white Christian men in the United States are under cultural and demographic threat.”**
If you’ve drunk the MBA kool-aid, you believe VCs and M&A bean-counters rationally price their investments. If an honest professor has confessed to you that company valuation is a black art, i.e., that there’s a heavy dose of intuition involved, you’ve been ahead of the game. The Twitter cockup now shows valuation to be a total dice-roll.
My nice Plaxo online address book disappeared when the host company was sold and the buyer discontinued the service. My contacts, up in smoke.Dropbox (cloud storage and data synch) and TunnelBear (VPN) both decided not to support my OS any more, as did Google Chrome. I face expensive upgrades.
Our eyes see only a tiny band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Matter is mostly empty space, but we see and feel it as continuous solid. Why don't we comprehend the world as it really is? It is because evolution has prepared us to survive and reproduce. Evolution has no interest in preparing us to see the world as it is. There is no reproductive value in seeing the whole truth.
The way Chief Justice Roberts tosses red herrings, he could get a job at Seattle’s Pike Market. The court may make unpopular decisions, he says, but that’s no reason to question the Supremes’ legitimacy. He’s right, but he’s right in a way that totally misses the point.
“We got rich fast here,” a man in Beijing told me, “and we’re fast getting richer. Those lazy Taiwanese aren’t getting richer at all.” It is fashionable on the mainland to diss Taiwan, but – as I was too polite to inform my interlocutor – Taiwan residents have created a fine civil society and have learned to get along well with each other, tasks that are much harder than just getting rich.
The book’s reviewers offer no clue that Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is the most important book published in this century. And it is that. Its fictional form makes climate science and climate remediation readable. It’s scary (pulling no punches about current perils and who’s responsible for them), hopeful (if we can get certain people off their asses, and get certain others to STFU), informative (with stunningly well-informed subplots on the political, science/engineering, and economic struggles ahead), and very, very long.
