More posts than usual this week as I was motivated twice to add a mid-day post to my usual morning fare. As a result, I’m afraid Jeff Poggi’s remarkable sonnet to Darwin got less attention than it should have; I hope you’ll go back, read it, and spot the hidden Darwin references.
The mid-day posts were motivated by a pair of (in my opinion, of course) outrages — first Paul Krugman’s suggestion that if we control for education and a few other demographic factors, we can make a meaningful comparison of private and public sector wages, ignoring all the ways in which public and private sector jobs differ. (And ignoring, too, all the ways in which one college degree might differ from another.) I suggested that a better metric is the quit rate in each sector; some commenters rightfully pointed out that that’s also an insufficient statistic. I bet it still comes a lot closer than Krugman’s attempt, though.
The second outrage was the Administration’s willingness to act as the equivalent of a Mafia enforcer for firms who prefer not to compete with foreign labor. Some commenters asked how this differed from any other case of the American government enforcing American laws while asking the beneficiaries to contribute to the costs. That’s easy. This law, unlike, say, the laws against murder, has as its primary purpose the restraint of trade (as opposed to oh, say, the general welfare).
We talked about how to estimate the peak of the Laffer curve (answer—it’s at about the 70% marginal tax rate, though I indicated some reasons why it might be somewhat leftward of that), mused about the value of a good CEO, and gave new meaning to the phrase phone sex when we reported on the fact that iPhone users have many more lifetime sex partners than Android users.
Incidentally, those readers who thought the flashy iPhone pays off in the mating market can’t be right (or at least can’t have hit on the key story), because the effect holds even for 40 year olds, who surely did not acquire their iPhones until long after they’d acquired most of their sex partners.
And we noted in passing the announcement of a proof that P does not equal NP (where you can look here for a very rough idea of what this means). Over the course of the week, this developed into a story of, I think, monumental significance, which I will surely revisit early next week. See you then.
fingers crossed for a write up of the D’Souza debate next week as well.
Fenn: The only thing delaying the writeup is that I still haven’t received the video. (There is video elsewhere on the web but the URL keeps changing, so I don’t want to link to it.) As soon as I have the video, you’ll have the blogpost.
Hidden Darwin references? Isn’t it all about Darwin? I suspect you mean find all of the phrases actually used in the Origin, like “from such simple forms”.
Great. I found it on CSPAN and look forward to watching it this weekend.
It’s probably worth noting that the “proof” of P!=NP was (as Scott Aaronson very rapidly surmised) no such thing.
I assume you’ll mention this if you blog about it again, but I think any link to the “proof” should now, at the very least, include scare quotes (I’d include the word “purported”).
John Faben: I’m composing my post for Monday, and I’m way ahead of you.
Watching the video of the debate now. Very nice opening. You were almost exactly 3 minutes into your allotted 5 minute opening when the moderator interrupted.
I just watched the video of the debate. I enjoyed it. Both did an excellent job thinking on your feet and I’ll give you credit. I thought your arguments were more based in reason.
Though, I think the specific question debated (“has religion contributed or detracted to society?”) implies religious effect on outcome that may not be there. I think the better question is the effect of centralized power vs. individualism.
Sometimes, religion contributes to the belief in centralized power and sometimes it detracts from it.
Yeah, I finished watching it too. I thought the “judge” detracted from the whole thing. Not only cut both of you short (you more so) but also tried to be funny and irritated me.
The format was obviously limiting. You both ended up arguing past each other mostly. He was off topic and argued Western culture is good and Christianity was fundamental to its success (not that religion in general is positive). You made excellent an excellent point about religion not being the foundation of morality, but I think the argument about past evils done in religion’s name can be attacked the same way you went after D’Souza’s witness:
causation vs correlation.
sure, a lot of killing and oppression are done in the name of one faith or the other, but is there any reason to believe people, tribes, cultures, etc. wouldn’t do it anyway? I suspect you and Whyte are correct (in an old post on this blog) that a lot of “believers” are really self-deluders. And I bet almost all religious atrocities were committed, deep-down, for very secular reasons. Maybe religion facilitates raising armies and keeping them cohesive (but then it could probably facilitate good things as well).
Apologies. I’ve crossed the Kling/Caplan GYOB (get your own blog) line by a good stretch. You argued well considering the constraints and it was fun to watch. It’d be interesting to see you debate this topic with a more worthy opponent.
I thought Stephen Moore was an absolute clown that ruined what should have been a great debate.