April 4, 2006

Adam Kleinheider, the Hard Right man,

has got a new, paying gig blogging about Tennessee and national politics for a Nashville station at http://volunteervoters.com/.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Keeping up with the Senate debate on immigration

Over at the VDARE.com blog, the lovely Bryanna Bevens is watching the Senate debate on immigration, so you don't have to. A sample:

Let me sum up the floor statement from Harry Reid, the Senator from Nevada:

Blah, blah, blah…we have a whole bunch of casinos…blah, blah,blah…they depend on undocumented immigrants to keep things running…casinos give me a lot of money…blah, blah, blah…we need a guest worker program.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 3, 2006

Watership Down author participated in "A Bridge Too Far" battle of WWII

The talking rabbit epic Watership Down by Richard Adams is one of the biggest bestseller novels of all time. To me, its main theme seems pretty obvious: the moral and functional superiority during war of English culture. Watership Down expounds the notion often attributed to the Duke of Wellington (who is cited more than once in the book) that "the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton." The book is a hymn to improvised teamwork in the English public school tradition: Hazel, the Head Rabbit, is modest and self-sacrificing and his followers are loyal yet free to show initiative.

(By the way, although Watership Down is often praised for the natural history accuracy of its portrayal of rabbits, in my limited experience the male-male cooperation shown by Hazel's band is wildly anomalous. We own two neutered male bunnies, one for each son, and, believe me when I tell you this, nobody in Sicily hates anybody as much as these two cute little balls of fluff hate each other. We have to keep them locked up in separate parts of the house to prevent them from ripping each other's guts out with their strong hind claws. Denied a chance to kill each other, they've kept up a long cold war of pooping in front of each other's doors as a way of asserting the full extent of their territories. One rabbit is a pretty good pet, but two male rabbits, unless you can get them to bond together as infants, is a disaster.)

I wasn't surprised to hear from a reader that Captain Richard Adams fought in the Battle of Arnhem of September 1944, the glorious disaster of the book and movie "A Bridge Too Far," in which thousands of British and American paratroopers and glider-borne troops were dropped up to 60 miles behind German lines to seize bridges across the Rhine and end the war by Christmas, 1944. Adams was in the 1st Airborne Division which was dropped 8 miles behind the crucial bridge at Arnhem, the bridge too far. Unfortunately, by a fluke, two elite German SS Panzer Divisions happened to be stationed between the lightly armed infantry and their goal. They succeed in seizing and holding the northern end of the bridge pr several days but the main Allied army couldn't penetrate to the southern end.

Only 15% of the division, including Adams, escaped across the Rhine and then through 60 miles of German-occupied territory My reader writes:

"Parachuting behind enemy lines was the easy part. Getting back to his own lines was the hard part. He lived the rabbit story for about a week and never forgot it, apparently."

In 2004, the 84-year-old Adams attended the 60th anniversary commemoration of Operation Market Garden.

Adams has said, "In a sense.... the book is about my war. I must confess that it was the high point of my life, and the rest has been little more than an aftermath."

Update 2014: I think this post overstates Adams participation in the fighting. I don't think he ever claimed to be one of the paratroopers. I think he has said that he was an officer behind the front lines in a supply job, and Watership Down is based on the stories of friends who made the jump.

Law School Confidential

A reader writes:


I'm currently in a Federal Criminal Law class [at famous law school A] . My professors are 1) a current federal prosecutor and 2) a federal judge.

We spent several hours on the federal death penalty [FDP], and more than half of that time was used to talk about the racial disparities in the FDP. Blacks make up about 50% of FDP prosecutions, though I believe (this wasn't mentioned in the class) that they tend to have a lower proportion of actual death sentences than whites when measured against prosecution rate (the Great White Defendant effect among juries, maybe? In either case, it's a question for people more knowledgeable than me).

Rather than focusing on things more properly in the ambit of a law school course, such as the actual statutes or caselaw affecting the subject, the class discussion meandered widely and vaguely over this topic of race - about how "troubling" and "disturbing" it all as, how it pointed to inherent inequities in the justice system, etc. Notably, this went on and on without the professor ever actually coming out and saying with finality something like, "the system is racist."

The discussion turned to the actual question of causal factors only near the end. Which is in itself somewhat striking - the implication throughout had been that no evidence of causation was needed: the fact that the FDP results were racially disproportionate to population was taken as res ipsa loquitur ["the thing speaks for itself"] by everyone there. Anyway, after reviewing many common theories of how racism might have produced the skewed results, the professor tossed out the observation that, "And there's one guy who says blacks just commit more murders than anyone else. [laugh, shrug] Which I really just don't buy, frankly." There were the perfunctory snorts of laughter from most of the students as well.


According to the website of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics "Blacks were 7 times more likely than whites to commit homicide in 2002." Blacks, who make up about 1/8th of the population, have committed about 52% of the homicides since 1976. Historian Roger Lane has demonstrated that the black-white murder gap has existed in Philadelphia all the way back through 1839.


Now, as a natural coward when it comes to social situations like this, I declined to mention anything as rude as the actual statistics. No matter how definitively I showed that reality was starkly at odds with their beliefs, I would have been a racist for saying so. I mean, really, why would I know such a thing unless I was a closet KKK-er looking for reasons to justify my obvious hatred of blacks?

It was an amazing thing to watch nonetheless. Here you had an elite educated cohort of individuals looking at an issue which will one day be within their professional ken and for which there were readily available and unambiguous statistics, and every one of them to the individual person was studiously looking away.


Something else that's characteristic is that this law school is located in an expensive inner suburb of a city with a notoriously dangerous black ghetto. Most of the law students in that class, when looking for housing, have personally thought long and hard about the tradeoff between the cheap rents available in the blacker parts of town versus the physical safety of living in the high rent whiter parts of town. Yet, there is zero connection in the minds of these high IQ people between their personal lives and this issue.

An awful lot of supposedly intellectual discourse in America is intended not at all to discover the truth, but to demonstrate status and to inculcate the proper status markers in young aspirants to the elite. This lengthy session at a top law school serves to demonstrate to future lawyers that the better sort of lawyer is too refined to mention the bleeding obvious. Only crass, unrefined people use Occam's Razor when thinking about social issues. Analogies to Victorian socialization of the upwardly mobile to never mention anything having to do with sex are obvious.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 2, 2006

The real reason for an amnesty

From UPI:

Bloomberg: Illegal immigrants help golfers
NEW YORK, April 1 (UPI) -- New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says golf fairways would suffer if illegal immigrants were returned to their native country.

"You and I are beneficiaries of these jobs," Bloomberg told his WABC-AM radio co-host, John Gambling. "You and I both play golf; who takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?"

However, Robert Heaney, general manager of Deepdale Golf Club -- a Long Island course where Bloomberg often plays -- told The New York Daily News that no illegal immigrants work at the club.


Deepdale is "maybe the most reclusive club in America," and it "hosts maybe ten rounds per day," according to golf course architect Tom Doak in his indispensable Confidential Guide to Golf Courses. Thank God that billionaires like Bloomberg don't have to choose between paying groundskeepers a little more or putting up with fluffy lies in the fairway that make it harder to draw a 3-iron shot into Deepdale's notoriously rigorous 15th green.

My new VDARE.com column:

Four Immigration Myths and the Credulous Media

By Steve Sailer

Having written 292 VDARE.com columns over the last six years, I'm inundated by feelings of both satisfaction and frustration when reviewing this year's Congressional and media debates over illegal immigration.

To their credit, House Republicans and much of the blogosphere get it. (See, for example, postings by Untethered, Udolpho, Parapundit, Mickey Kaus, Glaivester, Your Lying Eyes, Pytheas, Chris Roach, Face Right, 2Blowhards, and Mean Mr. Mustard.)

And yet in the more insulated institutions, the Senate and the legacy media, ludicrous falsehoods long ago exploded on VDARE.com and elsewhere are still proffered as if they were indisputable fact.

The lack of accountability and integrity in the mainstream press is striking. A pundit, once established, can apparently propagate nonsense catastrophic to America for years without paying any career price for his incompetence or bad faith.

The appalling legislation approved in the Senate Judiciary Committee with the support of four foolish Republicans (and of all the Democrats, of course) is the unsurprising outcome of the risks I've long pointed out in the Bush-Rove strategy.

A Bush victory in 2004 was always going to hinge on turning out the non-Hispanic white majority in vast numbers. But that was too politically incorrect to explain to the media, so, it appears, the White House concocted a smokescreen operation bamboozling innumerate reporters into believing that the small Hispanic vote would, somehow, be the key to the GOP victory.

When the Administration finally revealed its open borders immigration plan in January 2004, it pointedly excluded previously illegal aliens and new guest workers from becoming citizens (i.e., voters), precisely because a majority were sure to vote Democratic.

Hilariously, Bush announced he was dead-set against "amnesty." He redefined the word "amnesty" so it no longer meant forgiving lawbreakers for their crimes and allowing them to continue to reap the benefits of their lawbreaking. Indeed, doing exactly that was an essential part of the Bush plan. In a special Humpty-Dumptian sense aimed solely at Republican Congressmen who don't want Democratic-leaning illegal immigrants to get the right to vote, Bush redefined "amnesty" to mean only "giving citizenship to illegals." ...

But as I wrote in February 2004 about the cynicism of Bush's plan to institutionalized a new class of disenfranchised helots:


"But Bush's new Machiavellianism automatically cedes the rhetorical high ground to the Democrats, who are already pushing for 'earned legalization' (i.e., giving illegals the vote). Bush is left contradictorily sputtering about how wonderful immigrants are and how we don't want them to become our fellow citizens."

One notorious problem with lying is that you start to believe your own lies. So, for the benefit of GOP Senators, let's review some of the most common myths about the political impact of immigration that are constantly retailed in the prestige press, even thought they were shot down years ago on VDARE.com: [More]


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Watership Down

Watership Down -- My younger son has been insisting that I read Richard Adams's 1972 novel about talking rabbits. I finally broke down and started reading and ... holy cow, this has to be one of the best epic war-adventure stories ever. The tale of a band of male rabbits who flee their native warren, which is slated for extermination by human land developers, and set off across the English countryside to establish a safe new warren high up on Watership Down. (A "down," oddly enough, is a tall bluff. "Watership" probably originally meant "water sheep" or place where sheep could be watered). Then they raid a totalitarian warren to liberate lady rabbits, followed by the frightening General Woundwort's massive counterattack.

It's a fairly violent but still idealized picture of the English at war. Unlike their enemies, this squad of rabbits cooperate well with each other, with each showing initiative in contributing his individual talents. Hazel, the leader of the rabbits, is portrayed as the ideal young British officer. Adams wrote in his Introduction, "To Hazel I gave the qualities of an officer under whom I had served [in WWII]. He had the natural power of leadership. He was not only brave but modest and retiring, yet with excellent judgment." The brilliant Blackberry is Hazel's tactical planning staff officer, while the intuitive genius Fiver, a sort of nontragic Cassandra whose visions are acted upon by Hazel, serves as his strategic planning aide. Adams writes, "Bigwig was based upon another officer I knew, a tremendous fighter, who was at his best when he had been told exactly what he had to do."

Leaving aside the question of whether "Watership Down" is children's literature at all (the difficulty of vocabulary is at the same high level as a typical literary novel for adults), it's noteworthy what a large proportion of the classics of children's literature have been written by "environmentalist tories" like Adams and J.R.R. Tolkien, the kind of "crunchy cons" who, if they were American, would be derided by supposed mainstream conservatives like Jonah Goldberg and John Podhoretz. Adams, for example, was a civil servant in the Department of Environment until the sudden success of Watership Down in his mid-fifties (it has now sold something like 50 million copies) allowed him to turn to writing full-time.

An article entitled "Quidditch quaintness: The values that triumph in the Harry Potter books are those of a nostalgic, conservative Little Britain" from the leftwing Guardian by a different Richard Adams snidely points out J.K. Rowling's conservatism:

However, the Harry Potter fanclub extends well beyond Tory supporters, in part because the books have a visible element of diversity. The problem is that it is little more than a veneer. While women make up many of the main characters, they receive little attention. Even Harry's friend, Hermione Granger, is a well-worn stereotype: the middle-class "girly swot" who tries to talk Harry out of taking risks. It's no surprise to learn that her parents are dentists...

A careful racial inclusiveness includes obviously Asian and black characters as students. But cultural identities are heavily connected to social background, and these have been scrubbed out by Rowling. Hogwarts celebrates Christmas and Halloween, but there are no feasts for Rosh Hashanah or Diwali. This is not so much multiculturalism as naive monoculturalism.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

What the movie "Titanic" doesn't tell you about the sinking of the Titanic

Christina Hoff Sommers writers in the Weekly Standard (via Luke Ford):

ONE OF THE LEAST VISITED memorials in Washington is a waterfront statue commemorating the men who died on the Titanic. Seventy-four percent of the women passengers survived the April 15, 1912, calamity, while 80 percent of the men perished. Why? Because the men followed the principle "women and children first."

The monument, an 18-foot granite male figure with arms outstretched to the side, was erected by "the women of America" in 1931 to show their gratitude. The inscription reads: "To the brave men who perished in the wreck of the Titanic. . . . They gave their lives that women and children might be saved."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A theory: Did the invention of antibiotics bring about Women's Lib?

One commonplace assumption today is that the strong societal pressure before the 1960s against married women having paid jobs outside the home was driven by mindless prejudice. Better informed commentators point out the sheer number of hours of labor that housework involved before the widespread availability of home appliances like driers and dishwashers. But, it also appears to me that expectations of cleanliness have declined as housework became more automated, which is the opposite of what you'd normally expect. If the amount of labor required to reach the desired goal drops in, say, half, you'd expect the desired goal to either remain stable or increase, not fall somewhat.

So, I'm wondering if the availability of sulfas in the 1930s and of penicillin from about 1944 kicked off a social revolution that only became visible about two decades later. My theory is that before antibiotics, household cleanliness was a life-or-death matter. Mothers did everything they could to prevent infections from starting in their children because they couldn't always stop them. (For example, in 1924, President Coolidge's 16-year-old son got a blister playing tennis, it became infected, and soon died.) After a generation of children grew up using antibiotics to cure infections, the obsession with household cleanliness decline.

So, is there any evidence for this theory?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Flores Island Hobbits

Greg Cochran's got a new theory: they weren't Hobbits, they were ... well, you'll have to wait for the scientific paper, but if it pans out, it will be a huge story, like appearance on the Jay Leno Show-huge.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 1, 2006

The Lobby in action:

When you Google on Mearsheimer Walt lobby, you find 177,000 references on the Web. When you Google on Mearsheimer Walt lobby "David Duke" you get 55,700 references. So, 30% of all articles mentioning the Israel Lobby study by the two prestigious foreign policy scholars drag in the NY Sun's utterly irrelevant David Duke red herring smear.

That, in a sick way, reflects an impressive degree of coordination and ruthlessness. At the intellectual level where you've even heard of Mearsheimer and Walt, you have to be aware, deep down, that you are humiliating yourself by repeating the David Duke smear. But, apparently, tens of thousands of people are so dedicated to preserving the Israel Lobby's continued stranglehold on public discourse that they willingly publicly abase themselves morally and intellectually.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Does Tom Wolfe script the news?

The current brouhaha over allegations by a black stripper that she was gang-raped by the almost all-white Duke U. lacrosse team sounds likes an amalgamation of Wolfe's three novels: "I Am Charlotte Simmons" (Duke U. was the main model for Wolfe's "Dupont U. and lacrosse players pop up in it as mega-frat boys); "A Man in Full" (one of the subplots was a dubious rape allegation made by the white daughter of Georgia Tech's biggest donor against the college's top black football player); and "Bonfire of the Vanities" (about the NYC district attorney's search for the Great White Defendant to relieve the tedium, distastefulness, and political incorrectness of prosecuting countless lowbrow guilty-as-sin minorities).


America's most distinguished jurist-intellectual, Richard A. Posner, has admitted Wolfe's prophetic talents in Posner's book Overcoming Law:


"When I first read The Bonfire of the Vanities … it just didn't strike me as the sort of book that has anything interesting to say about the law or any other institution…. I now consider that estimate of the book ungenerous and unperceptive. The Bonfire of the Vanities has turned out to be a book that I think about a lot, in part because it describes with such vividness what Wolfe with prophetic insight (the sort of thing we attribute to Kafka) identified as emerging problems of the American legal system.

"The book was written before Michael Milken was convicted and Clark Clifford indicted; before investment bankers and securities brokers were dragged, crying, in handcuffs from their offices on charges of criminal fraud that often turned out to be unsubstantiated; before courthouses became scenes of violence; before the Tawana Brawley fraud; before the trials of the police who beat up Rodney King; before the Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal in the first of those trials; before the trial of the rioters; before the indictment of O.J. Simpson. American legal justice today seems often to be found at a bizarre intersection of race, money, and violence, an intersection nowhere better depicted than in The Bonfire of the Vanities even thought the book was written before the intersection had come into view."


UPDATE: 4/10/06: The Duke Lacrosse Goat Rodeo only gets better: KTLA reports:


Lawyers representing members of the Duke University lacrosse team say DNA tests found no link between players and an exotic dancer who says she was raped at a team party.... An attorney representing the team says tests by the state crime lab found no DNA material from any young man on the body of this complaining woman.

Defense attorneys also say time-stamped photographs show the woman was already injured when she arrived at a party.


Also, WRAL reports:


According to a 2002 police report, the woman, currently a 27-year-old student at North Carolina Central University, gave a taxi driver a lap dance at a Durham strip club. Subsequently, according to the report, she stole the man's car and led deputies on a high-speed chase that ended in Wake County.

Apparently, the deputy thought the chase was over when the woman turned down a dead-end road near Brier Creek, but instead she tried to run over him, according to the police report.

Additional information notes that her blood-alcohol level registered at more than twice the legal limit.

In spite of that incident, her attorney at the time, Woody Vann, asserts that what happened then should not cause people to question her character now. He said she is a decent and credible human being.


Isn't it about time that Tom Wolfe's critics publicly admit that the man understands modern American better than any of them could ever dream of?

Once again we see from the media's frenzied hunt for the Great White Defendant (to use Wolfe's term from 1987's Bonfire of the Vanities), so reminiscent of the last umpteen episodes of the Law & Order franchise, that what white Americans really like is sticking it to other white Americans. As Wolfe pointed out in his description of the New York City district attorney's office, white Americans find the transgressions of African Americans and Hispanics to be depressing and boring, in large part because whites see themselves (condescendingly) not as being in status competition with minorities, just with other whites. This is not because white people hate white people as a whole, just other white people they are competing with for status. The Duke lacrosse team, a bunch rich preppie jerks, makes a wonderful target for other whites wishing to parade their moral superiority.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Question

Question from a reader:

I am wondering if you have ever looked into the issue of African-American's distrust of the medical system. I can imagine that older black men and women might harbor suspicion (since they remember days of segregated health care) but does the Tuskegee syphilis study still exert such a long shadow? Is there really that much distrust? I wonder if this has just become a cliche passed down by nearly everyone who writes about race and health...

Any thoughts? Any leads on scholars who have looked into this with an open-mind?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Michael Lind read my "Citizenism" article

The maverick patriotic leftist writes a brief satire:

"A Post-Patriotic Progressive Runs for Congress"
By Michael Lind

"Hello. I'm a post-patriotic progressive. I believe that nation-states like the USA are obsolete and indeed immoral. I abhor and denounce the bigotry of 'citizenism'-- the idea that the American government should favor the interests of the 300 million citizens of the US over those of the other 5.7 billion people on earth. I oppose policing and fencing the border, just as I oppose any measure that would threaten the inalienable human right of foreign nationals to sneak into the US without our government's knowledge or permission. And whenever I see an American flag, it creeps me out because it seems, well, fascistic."

"Vote for me, my fellow citizens--oops, I mean, my fellow territorial residents, to represent you in the Congress of the antiquated USA, pending the formation of a North American Union, a World Parliament, or a United Federation of Planets."

A Google search shows that a large majority of all web references to "citizenism" made by Americans are in response to my articles.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

March 31, 2006

Stephen Walt to step down as head oh Harvard's Kennedy School of Government?

A reader writes:

First Harvard boots Larry Summers for exhibiting Galilean curiosity about the world around him, and now Harvard boots the Dean of the Kennedy School of Government for daring to point out that the people who are powerful enough to have him fired are . . . . powerful.

But this lockdown on free speech at Harvard pales in comparison to the move to crush Politically Incorrect speech in Europe and Canada.

I fear that we are entering a new global Dark Age.

I'm having trouble confirming this demotion of Walt. Justin Raimondo cites this article in The Australian newspaper, which looks legit, but raises the question of why the only publication to hear about it is on the opposite side of the world from Cambridge, MA. A reader writes:

I Googled too when I heard this-- but after reading the Australian article it struck me that these sorts of post are typically time limited in academica. Believe it or not, many academics would rather be spending time researching and writing. I found a report from four years ago on Walt's appointment. Coupled with the way the Australian phrased the resignation 'KSG confirmed Walt will be stepping down in June' , it sounds to me like this is a normal academic duty rotation.

In any case, doesn't this entire controversy where the Israel Lobby en masse furiously denounces these two scholars for pointing out the existence of the Israel Lobby remind you of that scene in "The Wizard of Oz" where the Wizard shouts, "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain"?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Unhappy Cesar Chavez's Birthday

The fervent anti-illegal immigration activist's birthday will no doubt be commemorated today as a vindication for illegal immigration. Mark Levin discussed my American Conservative article "Cesar Chavez, Minuteman," which tells the true story, on Sean Hannity's radio program last night.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

A brief philosophy, history, forecast, and theology of science

Stewart Brand, founder of the hippie touchstone The Whole Earth Review, gave the following introduction to Kevin Kelly's "SPECULATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE":

Science, says Kevin Kelly, is the process of changing how we know things. It is the foundation our culture and society. While civilizations come and go, science grows steadily onward. It does this by watching itself.

Recursion is the essence of science. For example, science papers cite other science papers, and that process of research pointing at itself invokes a whole higher level, the emergent shape of citation space. Recursion always does that. It is the engine of scientific progress and thus of the progress of society.

A particularly fruitful way to look at the history of science is to study how science itself has changed over time, with an eye to what that trajectory might suggest about the future. Kelly chronicled a sequence of new recursive devices in science...

2000 BC — First text indexes
200 BC — Cataloged library (at Alexandria)
1000 AD — Collaborative encyclopedia
1590 — Controlled experiment (Sir Francis Bacon)
1600 — Laboratory
1609 — Telescopes and microscopes
1650 — Society of experts
1665 — Repeatability (Robert Boyle)
1665 — Scholarly journals
1675 — Peer review
1687 — Hypothesis/prediction (Isaac Newton)
1920 — Falsifiability (Karl Popper)
1926 — Randomized design (Ronald Fisher)
1937 — Controlled placebo
1946 — Computer simulation
1950 — Double blind experiment
1962 — Study of scientific method (Thomas Kuhn)

It's interesting how there are two golden ages in this list: the 17th Century and the mid-20th Century.

Projecting forward, Kelly had five things to say about the next 100 years in science...

4) New ways of knowing will emerge. "Wikiscience" is leading to perpetually refined papers with a thousand authors. Distributed instrumentation and experiment, thanks to miniscule transaction cost, will yield smart-mob, hive-mind science operating "fast, cheap, & out of control." Negative results will have positive value (there is already a "Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine"). Triple-blind experiments will emerge through massive non-invasive statistical data collection--- no one, not the subjects or the experimenters, will realize an experiment was going on until later. (In the Q&A, one questioner predicted the coming of the zero-author paper, generated wholly by computers.)

Kelly's talk offers many more potential improvements in the methodology of science. Brand concludes:

"Science is the way we surprise God," said Kelly. "That's what we're here for." Our moral obligation is to generate possibilities, to discover the infinite ways, however complex and high-dimension, to play the infinite game. It will take all possible species of intelligence in order for the universe to understand itself. Science, in this way, is holy. It is a divine trip.

Novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who was, in his own way, both a part-time scientist and a deeply religious man, seemed to share this sense of the universe as a divinely-instituted puzzle that we are morally obliged to try to solve through science and art, even though the game might go on on forever.

(Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution).

A reader points out:

"Interesting about scientific developments list. But "1920" for Karl Popper's falsifiability is surely far too early? KP published LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY in 1934. In 1920 he was only 18, and while he might have started world championship philosophizing very young, he didn't start that young!"

Another says:

"Recursion is the essence of science. For example, science papers cite other science papers..."

No, feedback is the essence of science: it checks itself against reality, adjusts itself, then checks again. Something that doesn't do that, like recursive-mutative theology, perpetually expands in contradictory ways. Force or fashion settles theological arguments; fit with reality settles scientific ones.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

News Flash

"Barry Bonds climbs up the outside of the Empire State Building and swats fighter planes to the ground with his bat. In response, baseball commissioner Bud Selig announces plans to consider a committee to possibly investigate the alleged influence of performance-enhancing drugs."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer