At last the GOP makes sense

The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.

The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.

As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them.

via People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say – Yahoo! News.

Don’t laugh, this explains a lot about the Democrats, Libertarians, and Tea Party too.

Oh boy

As grieving parents, family and friends try to deal with the tragedy of the Chardon High School killings, at least one commentator is cackling with glee. For Todd Starnes of (where else?) Fox News, the killings give him the perfect opportunity to ask, “Why is school prayer only allowed during tragedies?”

As police try to make sense of the senseless, the school superintendent called on people to pray.

It was a wise decision.

But perhaps lost in the chaos is the irony that in American public schools – people are not allowed to pray.

Liberals have successfully banished God from the classroom, replacing Him with the manmade god of secularism.

Yes, those darned liberals and their support for liberal handgun access. Oh wait, no, sorry, handguns are real, and aren’t really a liberal thing. Let’s blame an imaginary response by an imaginary God to an imaginary ban on people praying. Because everybody knows that if you don’t let God into the classroom, He gives handguns to emotionally unstable kids and tells them to go kill people—even when He’s not really banned from school.

God loves cheaters

You know that old saying, “Cheaters never prosper”? According to a report from Science, that may be just clever propaganda designed to conceal the wealth-producing secrets of the rich.

The team’s findings suggest that privilege promotes dishonesty. For example, upper-class subjects were more likely to cheat. After five apparently random rolls of a computerized die for a chance to win an online gift certificate, three times as many upper-class players reported totals higher than 12—even though, unbeknownst to them, the game was rigged so that 12 was the highest possible score.

via Shame on the Rich – ScienceNOW.

If you think about it, it does make sense: if you have an environment where some people value fairness and fair play, and other people are willing to do whatever it takes to maximize their rewards, then over time the fair play folks will see more of their rewards shared with others (meaning less reward for themselves), while the whatever-it-takes folks will end up with more rewards for themselves, provided they’re reasonably wily about getting away with it.

And once they get enough to start buying their own news media, lobbyists, and political candidates… Hmmm, I wonder how long it would take this process to divide society into 99% fair-players and 1% wealthy cheaters? Part of me says this is over-simplified and too plausible to be true. On the other hand, it would explain a lot.

Who said it?

Here’s a bit of a riddle for some of you. Who said the following?

I don’t want to go to a trade war, I want to beat China. I want to go to war with China and make America the most attractive place in the world to do business.

Need a hint? He also said this:

I do not want to make black people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money, I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.

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Night of the living…plants?

The Washington Post reports that a team of Russian scientists has successfully reanimated a flowering plant from some old seeds. Really old seeds.

The Russian research team recovered the fruit after investigating dozens of fossil burrows hidden in ice deposits on the right bank of the lower Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia, the sediments dating back 30,000-32,000 years.

What makes this so remarkable is that according to top scholars at ChristianAnswers.net, this is three times longer than the entire earth has been in existence, making it clear that the Russians have not only resurrected an extremely ancient species, but have found a way to recover plant materials from some other dimension, like maybe heaven. Or something. It’s probably quantum.

Yeah, that’s the ticket. Quantum.

Phone companies want fewer consumer protections

What do you do when consumer protection regulations are interfering with profits? Well, if you’re as big as AT&T, you just buy yourself some new laws.

The industry is pushing Senate Bill 135, referred to as “the AT&T bill” by its sponsor and others because it originated with that company’s lobbyists. The bill would strip the Kentucky Public Service Commission of most of its remaining oversight of basic phone service provided by the three major carriers — AT&T, Windstream and Cincinnati Bell — such as the power to initiate investigations into service problems.

via Kentucky telephone companies pushing for option to end basic service | Politics and Government | Kentucky.com.

An honest liar

This looks like it’s going to be, well, amazing…

Justin Weinstein and Tyler Meason, two of the filmmakers behind Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey and Sons of Perdition respectively, are making a documentary about the man, appropriately titled An Honest Liar: The Story of the Amazing James Randi. The film will not only dive into his past and talk to other fellow expert skeptics like Adam Savage, Bill Nye, Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Penn and Teller, but it will also serve to document Randi’s next grand debunking as he plans and assembles, “an Ocean’s Eleven-type team for a carefully orchestrated exposure of a fraudulent religious organization.”

Hat tip to Movies.com. Trailer below the fold.

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Ah, progress

Many people are in shock and mourning after the unexpected death of singer Whitney Houston. As reported by the International Business Times, however, others are crying all the way to the bank.

Sony Music raised the price of Houston’s songs just 30 minutes after her death, reports The Guardian. The retail price was raised from about $8 (£4.99) to about $13 (£7.99), which automatically raised the price of digital sales on platforms such as iTunes.

I have just one thing to say about that.

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Sabotaging Science

Via Greg Laden’s blog, this leaked document from climate change denialists:

Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. His effort wil focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain — two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science. We tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $100,000 for 20 modules in 2012, with funding pledged by the Anonymous Donor.

Is that for real? Holy crap.

 

How the Bible drives technology

There’s a fascinating story over at the Atlantic about the impact of the Bible on science and technology. And it’s not what you’d think.

Over the past several decades missionary groups like the Wycliffe Bible Translators have sometimes been among the first visitors to remote cultures to learn those cultures’ languages — and to do some pretty thorough (though often amateurish) ethnographic study: after all, you can’t translate the Bible into a language until you understand not just the linguistic vocabulary of a people but their cultural vocabulary too. (The whole discipline of anthropology has deep roots in Christian missions.) That this study is done for explicitly conversionist purposes makes the Wycliffe translators, and other Christians who do similar work, immensely controversial; but the bodies of ethnographic and linguistic knowledge they have amassed are remarkable.

The main focus of the article is about the latest development in this trend: Christian missionaries working to create Bible translations in people’s native languages, that are accessible via cell phone. In the process, they’re solving unique technical problems that mainstream cell phone apps never bother to tackle, due to the lack of a profitable market.

It’s quite a paradox. On the one hand, it shows that believers can do legitimate scientific and technological work when they put their mind to it. And yet, ironically, their success in such fields only highlights their failures when it comes to the message they’re working so hard to share. If they only thought more clearly about their own faith, they could save themselves a lot of work. And yet, if they failed to do this work, how much would we lose?