Feb
1
2025

Senator Maggie on Science

A snip from Junior's confirmation hearing:

Well, that's our state's contribution to shaving points off the national IQ.

Confession: I went through a "philosophy of science" phase in my twenties. Hume, Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, Lakatos, … It can really mess up your brain. Didn't help with my scientific career either, which flamed out pretty quickly afterwards. I've gradually come to believe that certain areas are not susceptible to philosophical wisdom: if very smart people have been arguing for centuries about those topics without reaching consensus, it may be that "truth" is simply beyond the grasp of our tiny minds.

I still like to check out the "free will" arguments, though.

Also of note:

  • But is it, in some sense, conscious? Kevin D. Williamson writes with his usual insight: The Federal Government Is Not a Startup. Long excerpt:

    People have been saying “We need to run government like a business!”—and trying to do so—for 200 years. The project always fails. The question isn’t whether it is going to fail again this time around, with the Silicon Valley tech mafia leading the way—the question is whether Elon Musk is smart enough to understand why it is going to fail.

    OpenAI, the firm that owns ChatGPT, reportedly loses about $150 … a second. Serious people value the firm at $300 billion. And that comes after DeepSeek, the Chinese open-source competitor, came out blazing. People who follow OpenAI closely argue that the firm’s business model has some pretty steep challenges: For anyone other than hobbyists, its tools are not actually all that cheap to use. So, it is losing money at a relatively high price point while facing competition from an open-source competitor, which is bound to put downward pressure on prices.

    In the frothy days of the 1990s dot-com bubble, companies without a real business model and not much in the way of customers or revenue saw—for a time—sky-high market valuations based solely on the fact that they were positioning themselves to be part of the coming digital revolution. That worked out great for a few firms and not at all for a lot more. The tech sector is a little more buttoned-down these days, but the distance between big idea and big profit remains considerable, and there is a kind of cultural aspect to it as well, as in Silicon Valley’s eternal founder-vs.-manager discourse. And even in today’s more conservative business climate, tech firms are not in the main famous for being beady-eyed stewards of cashflow—they are epic pissers-away of money, but the upsides to startup success are so rich that they can maintain a pretty high burn rate. What’s $150 a second among friends?

    The federal government currently spends a little more than $200,000 a second. And the big idea from Donald Trump and Elon Musk is to lower that number by bringing in the sort of people who are currently overseeing that $150/second loss at OpenAI.

    A few days back, Robert Rubin (a Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton) wrote a WSJ op-ed describing The Limits of ‘Running Government Like a Business’. He makes a number of good points, but I liked even better the point made in Clifford G. Holderness's LTE a few days later:

    Robert Rubin’s op-ed […] misses the key difference between the private and public sectors: The decision-makers in each have different incentives.

    The essence of private property is that decision rights—and the wealth effects of exercising those rights—are vested in the same person. If Mr. Rubin made value-decreasing decisions as head of Goldman Sachs, the value of his holdings would have declined, as would have the wealth of his fellow partners. If his management didn’t improve, he would have been replaced. Owners of private property ultimately have to eat their own cooking.

    Government officials, by contrast, seldom bear the wealth consequences of their actions. Indeed, in many instances this is prohibited by law. Mr. Rubin’s decisions as Treasury secretary doubtless caused greater wealth effects than his decisions at Goldman, but he personally bore few of the consequences. This doesn’t mean one system of incentives is better than the other—but it does mean the incentives are different in each and that what works in the private sector may not work in the public.

    And while we're on that page, a second LTE from Michael H. Way also points out a certain asymmetry:

    A significant difference between the sectors: No matter how incompetent, government keeps expanding.

    The Internal Revenue Service assesses large penalties to those who make honest filing errors but can’t pass the most basic audit. The Environmental Protection Agency fines businesses for pollution infractions but paid no penalty for the 2015 Gold King Mine wastewater spill. California loses more than $20 billion in pandemic relief fraud, wastes billions more on high-speed rail to nowhere, and fails to complete basic fire abatement, but the agencies responsible duck responsibility.

    Every election cycle we throw out some clowns and bring in new ones. Our government circus nevertheless keeps on growing.

    (paid link)
    True dat.

    But if you want to see an argument that the USA is conscious, Amazon link on your right.

  • Pointing the finger at the real culprits… is J.D. Tuccille: Americans who hate inefficiency but love bloated government. Skipping down to the "love":

    A bigger problem, though, is that Americans aren't really comfortable with cutting the expense and bloat of the most expensive and bloated parts of the federal government. When asked by AP-NORC if the government was spending enough, most said they think the government is spending too little in areas including education (65 percent), Social Security (67 percent), Medicare (61 percent), Medicaid (55 percent), assistance to the poor (62 percent), and border security (51 percent).

    The fact is that it's impossible to cut the cost and size of government if all these areas are considered untouchable. According to the U.S. Treasury, as of Fiscal Year 2025, 21 percent of federal spending goes to Social Security, 15 percent to national defense, 14 percent to health, 13 percent to net interest to service the government's massive debt, 13 percent to Medicare, 9 percent to income security, and so on.

    DOGE might be able to squeeze some inefficiency out of these programs, but it's not going to reduce the size and expense of government if people insist that more be spent on these programs. Well, unless national defense is gutted, since only 34 percent of respondents think too little is spent on that category.

    Always popular among the populi: panem et circenses.

    (Yeah, pretentious and gratuitous Latin. Although meant to indicate that it's Always Been With Us.)

  • Me too. Jonah Goldberg joins me in confessing: I’m a Sucker for America. From his sickbed:

    A video of Anthony Mackie, the African American actor tapped to take over the role of Captain America, appeared on a panel in Italy to promote Captain America: Brave New World. “To me Captain America represents a lot of different things and I don’t think the term ‘America’ should be one of those representations,” Mackie said.  “It’s about a man who keeps his word, who has honor, dignity and integrity. Someone who is trustworthy and dependable.”

    Much like the influenza in my bloodstream, it went viral. 

    By Tuesday, Mackie tried to clarify. “Let me be clear about this, I’m a proud American and taking on the shield of a hero like CAP is the honor of a lifetime,” he wrote on Instagram. “I have the utmost respect for those who serve and have served our country. CAP has universal characteristics that people all over the world can relate to.”

    I’ll be honest. I don’t think it’s a great mea culpa. The issue wasn’t that he insulted “those who serve and have served our country.” The issue was he insulted America itself.  We’ll return to that in a moment.

    I don't think I've set foot in a movie theater since last April (Civil War). I'm unlikely to make an exception for Captain America: Brave New World, as I assume it will show up on Disney+ quickly enough. (But I'll probably be buying tickets for Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning come May.)

  • "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." Robert F. Graboyes doubles the Queen's count, and tells us Why Impossible Things Are Everywhere. He gives twelve examples, all too long to excerpt, but here's a snippet, where he quotes someone else.

    “Have you ever witnessed a total solar eclipse? Usually when I give a lecture, only a couple of people in an audience of several hundred people raise their hands when I ask that question. A few others respond tentatively, saying, ‘I think I saw one.’ That’s like a woman saying, ‘I think I once gave birth.’”

    Yes, indeed.

    The "impossible thing" in this case is the fact that eclipse totality occurs so spectacularly. The odds against that happening are (literally) astronomical. And yet…

  • Life hack. From Ars Technica: “Just give me the f***ing links!”—Cursing disables Google’s AI overviews.

    If you search Google for a way to turn off the company's AI-powered search results, you may well get an AI Overview telling you that AI Overviews can't be directly disabled in Google Search. But if you instead ask Google how to turn off "fucking Google AI results," you'll get a standard set of useful web suggestions without any AI Overview at the top.

    Funny. But you might want to try it quickly, it sounds like behavior that will be patched.