Monthly Archives: May 2017

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

A Renaissance of Religion

I have spent some time contemplating the possible effects of AI and machine learning.  We could be facing a future where not only truck drivers and cab drivers are replaced by autonomous vehicles but technical thinking jobs can be replaced

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The Illusion of Expertise

from The New Yorker, EVERYBODY’S AN EXPERT by Louis Menand It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their

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Intellectual Flattening

life is just too complicated to reduce to binary choices from Spanish Bombs by Kevin Williamson at National Review William F. Buckley Jr. scoffed at American progressivism as the ideology of “free false teeth,” i.e., the belief that wherever there

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Progressives, Libertarians, and Conservatives

by Henry Oliner The Libertarian believes that fundamentally man is driven by economic self-interest.  Ironically, socialists are driven by the same belief in the fundamental motivation of man. Progressives and Libertarians are driven to quite different responses to this belief.

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Poverty and Privilege

from “The Inequality Trap: Fighting Capitalism Instead of Poverty (UTP Insights)” by William Watson “In sum, we should worry less about inequality, which is a distraction from what ought to be our true targets, poverty and privilege, and we should

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The Danger of Scientism

from the FEE, Foundation for Economic Education, Be Wary of the Orwellian “Enlightened” Classby Robin Koerner Science and scientism are superficially similar but epistemic opposites. A true scientist remains doxastically open. That means that she works always on the assumption that

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Real Growth

from National Review and Kevin Williamson, Don’t Count On the Growth Fairy The powers that be in Washington dream of stronger growth, because stronger growth would mean that they could put off some hard and unpleasant decisions. Stronger growth would raise

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Hoisted by Their Own Petard

The Problem with Investigating Trump from Kevin Williamson at National Review: The Obama administration left us with a poison bouquet, a federal government whose investigatory agencies are thoroughly corrupted, politicized, and untrustworthy. We know for a fact that the Internal Revenue

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The Unluckiest Political Movement

from Kevin Williams at National Review, Camino de Servidumbre But men do not like being told that they cannot do that which they wish to do, and this is particularly true of men who have a keen interest in political power.

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Righteous Orthodoxy

from the FEE, Foundation for Economic Education, Be Wary of the Orwellian “Enlightened” Class by Robin Koerner He understood that the morality of a political ideology in practice cannot be determined from its theoretical exposition – but only from the actual experiences of

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Collective Delusion

from Let’s Get Metaphysical About Trump and the ‘Post-Truth Era’ by Crispin Sartwell Likewise, truth cannot be a matter of social consensus. That groups are in agreement has no tendency to show that what they believe is true, or else

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Rhetoric vs Reality

From economist Tyler Cowen at Bloomberg, What Democrats Won’t Admit About Voters and Health Care But keep in mind that the American Health Care Act of 2017 does not prevent states from spending whatever is needed to cover pre-existing conditions, if

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Hayek Predicts Venezuela

Kevin Williamson makes an interesting distinction between the welfare state and socialism. from National Review, Camino de Servidumbre There are two ways of thinking about economics: Many progressives (and many right-wing populists) believe that economics is less of a science

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A Health Care Reader

The health care debates are particularly contentious because they are a focus of the fundamental philosophical differences in political and economic thinking.  While activists insist they are only trying to be pragmatic in providing care for all, they remain hostage

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Metaphysical Rights

from Kevin Williamson at National Review, The ‘Right’ to Health Care, Declaring a right in a scarce good is meaningless. It is a rhetorical gesture without any application to the events and conundrums of the real world. If the Dalai

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Poor Winners and Worse Losers

Peggy Noonan at the WSJ,  Trump Has Been Lucky in His Enemies That most entrenched bastion of the progressive left, America’s great universities, has been swept by . . . well, one hardly knows what to call it. “Political correctness” is too old

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Illiberal Contempt

From David French at National Review, America’s ‘Smug-Liberal Problem’ The only people who can’t recognize that our nation has a “smug liberal” problem are smug liberals. Case in point, smug liberal (and television comedienne) Samantha Bee. On Sunday, CNN’s Jake

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