The New York Times recently ran THIS STORY about B16’s meeting with President Bush.
Here’s the opening sentence:
President Bush and Pope Benedict XVI, both religious conservatives, met for the first time on Saturday in the papal palace at the Vatican, where the pontiff privately expressed his concerns to the president about “the worrying situation in Iraq,” especially the treatment of minority Christians there.
"Both religious conservatives"?
You just know that the folks at the NYT were just itching to caption the above picture (also from the story) something like "President Bush and Pope Benedict XVI, both religious conservatives, review plans for world domination."
Unfortunately they had to settle for "President Bush took a close look at his gifts, an etching and a medallion, from Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday."
They do it naturally, and they have a high old time at it (at least until somebody bites or scratches a little too hard).
Why do they do that?
I mean: Why are they programmed to engage in fun, mock fights when they are young?
Because they’re going to have to engage in real fights when they’re grown. The rough-and-tumble play instinct lets them practice in a safe way what they will have to do in earnest later on. It exposes them to situations that are like real fights so that they can get accustomed to them, but without the danger that a real fight has.
That’s why this playful wrestling is fun. It’s to get the creatures to do it (they get the reward of fun) while they’re simultaneously learning about something that will not be so fun later on.
And humans have the same instinct, which is one of the reasons human boys wrestle and engage in rough-and-tumble play and play cowboys and indians or cops and robbers or whatever the local cultural variant of the game is.
It’s also part of why we get a thrill out of reading suspenseful or scary stories: We mentally put ourselves through dangerous situations in such stories (vicariously, through the characters) so that we’ll be able to better handle danger ifwhen we encounter it in real life.
This kind of play thus has an important function.
But what happens if you get a society full of parents that are overprotective of their kids and who think that is the duty of parents to completely shield children from risk rather than helping them learn how to accept and manage risk? MORE THAN YOU MIGHT THINK. (CHT: Instapundit.)
There are a lot of things I disagree with Arnold Schwarzenegger about–from abortion to immigration–but he was dead-on recently when he indicated the best way to learn a language.
EXCERPT:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told a gathering of Hispanic journalists that immigrants should avoid Spanish-language media if they want to learn English quickly.
"You’ve got to turn off the Spanish television set," the Republican governor said Wednesday night at the annual convention of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. "It’s that simple. You’ve got to learn English.
"I know this sounds odd and this is the politically incorrect thing to say and I’m going to get myself in trouble," he said. "But I know that when I came to this country, I very rarely spoke German to anyone."
Now telling a group of Hispanic journalists that Latinos should avoid media produced in Spanish was bound to provoke reaction, and it did:
"I’m sitting shaking my head not believing that someone would be so naive and out of it that he would say something like that," said Alex Nogales, president and chief executive of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, who called the remarks "preposterous."
Nogales said Schwarzenegger must have forgotten the challenges of being an immigrant in the United States. Hispanic immigrants need Spanish-language media to stay informed and "function in this society," he said.
"That doesn’t mean they are going to sit there," he said. "They are also going to learn English in the meantime."
I’m sorry, but it’s Mr. Nogales that is naive and out of it. You will have greater success in a country if you can speak the local language, and you will learn the language faster and better if you use a total immersion methodology, which means denying yourself access to material in languages you already speak. The more time you force yourself to spend interacting with the local langauge, and the less you use your native language as a crutch, the better you will learn the new language. Period.
To the extent Spanish-speakers–or speakers of any language (English included)–allow themselves to have recourse to their native language, it will slow their acquisition of a new one. Every hour a person spends watching TV in their native language is an hour that they’re not spending watching TV in the language they’re trying to learn, or studying the language formally, or talking to people who speak the new language. It hinders their ability to think in the new language, which is essential for language mastery.
Slowing (or stagnating) your acquisition of the language of the local environment is precisely what will cause one to have problems trying to "function in this society."
The longer you don’t know the local language, the longer your ability to function in the society will be limited, leaving you more vulnerable and exploitable by those who do know the local language. Getting the local language down is key to personal empowerment and the ability to succeed in a society.
The course recommended by Mr. Nogales would prolong and intensify the struggles that native Spanish-speakers in the U.S. have, potentially (especially for those who are here illegally) putting them or keeping them in situations of exploitation and danger.
If I relocated to a non-English speaking country, one of my highest priorities would be learning the local language as fast as possible, and the way for me to do that would be to spend as much time functioning in the new language as possible, denying myself the crutch of English at every possible opportunity.
Once I’d mastered the new language, I could indulge myself by reading English language newspapers or watching English language television or listening to English language music or reading English Internet sites, but during the crucial period of language acquisition, I’d avoid English as much as possible.
This is not a matter of identity politics; it’s a matter of how humans learn languages.
Economics is the study of the use of limited resources that have alternative uses. Any time you have to "economize"–limit the amount of resources you’re devoting to something–you’re dealing with economics.
There are so many needs in the world today that we can’t possibly address all of them–at least in the way that we’d like to address them if we had unlimited resources.
So we have to set priorities about where we’re going to spend our resources–what problems should get our attention first.
We can do this either unreflectively (kind of the way Congress tackles pork barrel spending, with legislators sticking in their pet projects without a real effort to ask "Do we really need a Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska?") or we can do it reflectively–trying to figure out a list of priorities systematically rather than piecemeal.
That’s what this guy is trying to do (CHT to the reader who e-mailed!). . .
Now, I’ll note that I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusions, or even that he’s identified the right list of things to work on–and this is a rather theoretical question anyway since he doesn’t have the 50 billion dollars he uses in his example (or I assume he doesn’t). I’d also say that we do need to devote some funds to projects that we don’t yet have the technology to address (research, including basic research, is important)–though of course there are big questions about whether it should be handled in the public or private spheres.
I also have questions about whether this guy’s folks have taken adequate account of the effects of corruption and institutional resistance to letting people address some problems (e.g., sure we could provide clean water infrastructure for Africa, but will the corrupt African governments let us do it or will they put up barriers to letting it be done for disfavored groups or will the funds vanish into the pockets of African dictators?). And I certainly don’t like the idea of the UN–or any other single global agency–setting forth to do all this (I much prefer a distributed approach in which different individual groups feel call to do different things). And I have questions about precisely how they want to prevent AIDS (I’m guessing it involves the use of condoms). And then there’s the fact that people NEED FOR JESUS isn’t on the list at all.
But I appreciate the effort to try to think realistically about what temporal problems can be solved and at what cost and what that says about what our temporal priorities should be.
So why is this post in the "Science" category rather than the "Economics" category, you ask?
Because of what his different teams of prioritizers concluded about where global warming belongs in the list of priorities–and these were of experts who were assuming that human-caused global warming is real.
That’s not to say it’s not a good effort. (CHT to the reader who sent the link.)
What the gentleman in the video is doing, essentially, is applying decision theory to the question of global warming in the style of Paschal’s Wager.
The gentleman states his case well, has clear talent as a producer of online videos, and–best of all–he’s got a good attitude and a willingness to subject his argument to examination, which he expressly invites.
Unfortunately, I don’t think his argument works. There are two basic reasons.
First, he does not fully detail the cost and benefit analysis of the different options he explores. Under the option for global warming being false and us making vain efforts to stop a non-real phenomena, he treats the costs purely in terms of money, noting that there would be monetary costs that could (in a hypothetical and admittedly extreme scenario) lead to a global depression.
Opposite this on his diagram is the cost of global warming being true and us doing nothing to stop it. For that option he lists not only the monetary impact of global warming but also polical, social, and health costs (again, for purposes of the thought experiment, pushed to an extreme case).
The basic problem here is that he is cashing out the costs in detail in the latter possiblity but not in the former. In the "false and we waste our efforts" box he’s not fully attending to the fact that money is just a symbolic system used to regulate the flow of goods and services which have an impact on human existence. That means that if you divert monetary resources toward one goal you are thereby not pursuing other goals.
In fact, that’s tied to the definition of economics itself, which is the study of the use of limited resources that have alternative uses.
Our presenter, as well spoken as he is, is not attending to the alternative uses to which the wasted investment to cure global warming would have.
Let me put it this way: Each billion dollars that you spend trying to cure global warming is a billion dollars that you don’t have to put toward feeding people, or doing cancer research, or doing AIDS research, or developing new technologies that will extend and improve lives, or buliding housing, or anything else.
The effort to cure global warming thus has not just a monetary cost but a human cost.
Or let’s look at it this way: What happens if we have the global depression that the presenter asks us to consider?
Well, what happens in major depressions? People starve to death. They don’t get medical care. They can’t get educations that will help them for the rest of their lives. They can’t get jobs. They lose their homes. There are riots and political indability. Wars can start. Governments can get toppled or become more restrictive and authoritarian to keep control of the populace. Crime and black markets soar.
What we see then is that if we cash out the "global depression" scenario in terms of its human costs, we find a picture not unlike that presented in the "global warming is real and we don’t do anything to stop it" disaster scenario. There will be monetary, political, social, health, and other costs in both worst case situations.
This makes it impossible to distinguish between them in the way that the presenter wishes us to.
How many people will die if we bring on a global depression by messing up the world economy in a vain effort to stop global warming? I don’t know, but most of them will be in the third world, where economic development is desperately needed to prevent people from dying for all sorts of reasons, from malnutrition to AIDS to malaria to war.
Allowing economic development to proceed globally by not messing up the world economy in a vain effort to stop global warming will save lives.
Will it save more lives than if global warming is real and we do nothing to stop it?
There is simply no way to know in the abstract, by pitting hypothetical worst case scenarios against each other. If you imagine a global warming horror story that kills X number of people, I can imagine a global depression that kills exactly the same number.
Which brings up one of the limitations of this application of decision theory. I’m a big fan of Pascal’s Wager, but Wager-type reasoning is useful in a limited number of situations, and this isn’t one of them.
When you can point to comparable hypothetical disasters on both forks of the logic tree, you have to start asking which disaster is more likely to occur.
The presenter actually invites us to do this, but he doesn’t explore the effects of that, presumably because he thinks that the global warming disaster scenario superdominates the decision, such that even if it isn’t likely, it is so bad that we just can’t take the risk.
But if we flesh out the global-warming-is-false-and-we-vainly-try-to-stop-it scenario, we realize that the alternative doesn’t superdominate, and so we must turn from looking strictly at possible results of our actions to the likely results of our actions.
We simply can’t look at hypothetical disaster scenarios and base policity decisions on the fact that they are possible, without asking how probable they are.
Consider this scenario: It is possible (certainly logically possible, and most would say ontologically possible as well) that there is an alien fleet speeding toward earth right now to destroy it with some kind of spiffy planetkilling technology (say, something that manipulates the sun to cause massive, instantaneously fatal global warming). The planetkiller will get here shortly, and the only chance we have to survive as a civilization is to throw the entirety of the world’s economic resources into building a massive planetary defense system to shoot down the planetkiller before it can mess up our sun.
While we already have the Apple computer needed for the effort, we don’t yet have all the other technology, and the only way we’ll get it is if we shut down absolutely all world economic activity and focus on this. That’s how tough the aliens are.
In contemplating this scenario, we could construct a grid like the one our presenter did and, if we paint the effects of the alien planetkiller in sufficiently vivid terms and then don’t explore in comparable detail the consequences of throwing all of our economic resources into developing a planetary defense system (like, for example, everyone starving) then it might look like the alien planetkiller scenario superdominates the discussion.
It would even superdominate manmade global warming!
But common sense tells us that we should not shunt all of the world’s economic activity into producing such a planetary defense system. The odds of there being such a fleet on its way to destroy us, and the odds of us being able to stop it if it gets here any time soon, are too remote.
It would be foolish and a waste of resources–and therefore a waste of human lives–to undertake that project.
And thus Pascal’s Wager can’t get us out of competing hypothetical disaster scenarios. If all a disaster has to be is possible in order to justify large-scale efforts being made to stop it then we will quickly run the world economy into the ground becaue there are a limitless number of possible-but-very-unlikely disasters that could happen.
What we have to do is go about the messy business of asking how likely are these disasters and what are the benefits and costs of undertaking particular projects to address them.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t engage in disaster preparedness or undertake specific projects to avoid potential disasters–even somewhat unlikely ones–but it is to say that hypothetical disasters of this sort–and global warming in particular–do not superdominate the decision.
After a long time with relatively few popes up for canonization, we’re now in an era in which there are a bunch of them (and there are some interesting theories on why that is, but that’s a subject for another day). One of these is Pius XII, who shephered the Church during WWII.
And who then was viciously slimed after the war.
Well, good for the Vatican for considering his canonization. Here’s some recent stories that have a bearing on that:
I’ll prescind from whether Pius XII actually merits sainthood. Instead, I want to remain in the realm of observable facts, which in this case seem to me to be the following:
A significant block in the Catholic church, including much of its senior leadership, has a strong conviction that Pius XII is a saint and should be formally recognized as such;
In other sectors of opinion, including much of the Jewish world, there is an equally strong conviction that Pius XII failed in his moral responsibilities during the Holocaust;
No new evidence, or new historical perspective, is likely to alter those convictions;
The primary force keeping this debate alive in the media, and making it a source of turbulence in Catholic-Jewish relations, is the question of possible sainthood.
Assuming those four premises are accurate, it seems to follow that there are only two ways out: Either Catholicism renounces sainthood for Pius XII, or we get it over with. Since the former is unlikely, the latter may be the best available option — and the sooner, the better. The alternative is allowing an endless cycle of point/counter-point exchanges to coarsen conversation and harden feelings.
An interesting exercise in ecclesiastical realpolitik, but if you’re in the "Pius XII should be declared a saint" camp, it goes to the issue of when it is prudent for him to be declared a saint.
It’s amazing they had the hubris to release it in the first place.
Still, it’s something to see the head of the thing noting that they can’t afford to do that kind of thing any more.
Oh, and I loved this bit:
Finn made clear that he was not trying to stifle criticism, but said that in the future, such statements should come from individual theologians, perhaps with others signing on, but not in the name of the CTSA.
In other words, "If you want to mouth off to the Vaticsan, you take the hit. I’ve got to look out for the good for the organization."
Half the purpose of issuing joint statements on behalf of the society was to protect the individual signatories by making them look like they’re part of a big, impressive group (or by not having individual signatories at all, just a joint statement of the organization). Having to make such statements on your own, without the society backing you up, will–indeed–"stifle criticism."
(Oh, and the other half of the purpose is to make the statements have more punch by them being issued by a society and not just an individual or a few individuals.)
New non-emergency system to ease burden on busy 911
By Michael Blue
Daily Texan Staff
A new non-emergency communication system unveiled by the Austin Police Department Tuesday may reduce an overloaded 911 system and help police focus their efforts on actual emergencies.
About 50 community members and police officials gathered at the Texas Medical Association Building to hear about the APD’s fall launching of the new 311 non-emergency communication system. With the new system, APD hopes 311 operators will absorb the non-emergency calls that have overburdened the 911 system.
Calls to 311 should not require immediate police action and include offenses such as property crimes no longer in process, animal control problems, illegally parked vehicles, vehicles blocking alleys or driveways or calls asking questions about telephone numbers, addresses and hours of operation for APD’s divisions or programs.
Paul Flaningan, APD spokesman, said the 311 system is specifically designed for calls that are not life threatening, as opposed to the 911 system that handles emergency situations.
“[The 311 calls] are for non-emergencies like someone calling and saying ‘Hey, some people are blowing off fireworks,’ or there is a water-main break or a fire hydrant erupts,” Flaningan said.
Currently, the 911 system is being deluged with non-emergency calls. APD estimates that between 50 and 60 percent of 911 calls are non-emergencies an estimated 240,000 and 360,000 phone calls that 311 operators could possibly handle. The effect could free up 911 operators to concentrate on situations for which 911 was created tackling emergencies that require immediate police intervention.
…
With the installment of the 311 system, APD believes that several objectives can be accomplished. Police objectives include decreasing officer response times to emergencies, reducing the number of 911 calls abandoned due to lengthy waiting times, and most importantly, the APD said freeing up officer time to concentrate on problem-solving activities.
Snopes says that they called the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, which confirmed that this was a real phone call they received (they’re still listing it as of "undetermined" veracity, though, since they don’t know if the woman placing the call was hoaxing the police department or not). They also state:
Anyone who has worked a police or emergency services dispatch line can attest that some callers just don’t seem to have a very good grasp of what kinds of situations constitute valid emergencies, or even what sort of problems fall within the purview of law enforcement or emergency rescue services. People call 911 for assistance in such matters as needing help with homework, clogged toilets, and non-functioning smoke detectors, to try to find out the latest sports scores and lottery results, to report broken televisions and cable outages, to seek assistance in locating lost pets, and to report all sorts of minor medical ailments.
