Unscientific American

I did not renew my subscription to Scientific American because it has devolved into a platform for collectivism. It is not merely the political agenda. Politics rests on epistemology and Scientific American has abandoned the scientific method and replaced it with authority opinion. 

In fact, science was presented that way 100 years ago. A scientist (professional or amateur) submitted their paper and if the journal found merit in it, they published it. Footnotes and references are the modern style. It can get excessive. In my review of The Invention of Enterprise for the now defunct Libertarian Papers (reprinted here), I took issue with an avalanche of citations to validate an obvious fact. Erring in the other direction, authors in Scientific American assert the hypothesis rather than offering evidence and Scientific American now publishes empassioned pleas for an intellectually bankrupt political agenda.

I have been thinking this through for over a year. I subscribed in 2020 because Covid closed the University of Texas and I (among very many other independent scholars) lost my library privileges. Subscribing to Scientific American (as well as Sky & Telescope) bought access to their archives. For Scientific American that was highly important. 

Today's left wing slant was obvious and I just ignored it. The science articles were still respectable. Evidence of that was in the January 2022 issue, which carried an article about the Antikythera Mechanism by Tony Freeth. However, the same  issue carried “Inside America’s Militias” by Amy Cooter. The first was a technical report for the general reader who is interested in science but uninformed on this topic. The second was one person's self-validation of beliefs she formed before she began her university education. 

 

From Dr. Amy Cooter's curriculum vitae.

Both were personal narratives. Freeth has devoted decades to studying, writing, and lecturing about the ancient computer. His article in this issue included many references, citations, and pointers to the works of others. Freeth has puzzled over the Antikythera and invested careful, questioning thought to the many problems it presents.

 

Cooter cites two people who agree with her, or with whom she agrees. Unlike Freeth, she did not come to this research with an open mind. She is not necessarily wrong in her basic facts, only in how she weaves them into a scripted oratorio.

 

It is an easy claim that the militias, being traditionalist are also masculine. The affinity of men for weapons is obvious by inspection. Benign sexism is a consequence of that. As a guy who has served in uniform, I assure you that protecting women and children is not open to question. At that same time, I served with, alongside, and under the command of women. I never had a problem, though I did report up the chain to inform the leadership about other men who did need some corrective counseling on the subject.[1] It is a known situation.

 

Dr. Amy Cooter does admit that the right wing militias do have women in command. In her January 2022 Scientific American essay, she wrote: “There are a few women who fully participate in militias, and because of their activity they tend to be well respected and rise to leadership roles. (Jessica Watkins, leader of an Ohio militia who was arrested for her participation in the Capitol riot, is one example.) Still, most militia units have a culture suffused with casual misogyny.” Personally, with my master’s in social science, if I were considering a doctorate, I would find the subject of women in command of traditionalist militias more compelling research than the observable truth that boys like to camp out and play with guns.

 

Like Cooter, I grew up Republican. My introduction to libertarian versus traditional conservative ideology came at the 1965 convention of Young Americans for Freedom. There, I met conservatives who were opposed to the draft and to the war in Vietnam. I also had to come to grips with the fact that many of my comrades on the right were racists who believed that Negroes are substantially different from and inferior to us white folk. I found that attitude repugnant and distanced myself from the people who asserted it. 

 

So, when in college, I turned hard to the left, I also found it easy to parse the many, many varieties of socialist theory, including the distinctions among British Labour and Social Democrats, Lenin, Trotsky, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and the American Marxist, Daniel de Leon and his Socialist Labor Party. Much later in life, I came to understand how left wing syndicalists became the anarchists of the Spanish civil war and right wing syndicalism became fascism. 

 

Understanding those nuances led me to ask why the same people who decry the insurrection of 6 January 2021 were silent during Occupy Wall Street. I admit that it is a rhetorical question. 

 

The final failure came in a special supplement for March 2022. Under the rubric “How COVID Changed the World” by senior editor Jen Schwartz, the lead article was “A Microbe Proved That Individualism Is a Myth: Humans evolved to be interdependent, not self-sufficient” by Robin G. Nelson (biological anthropologist at Arizona State University). Nelson builds her hypothesis from an inventory of complaints: 

 

“For countless Americans, there was a dull but persistent pain to prepandemic life: high-priced housing, nearly inaccessible health care, underresourced schools, wage stagnation and systemic inequality. It was a familiar ache, a kind of chronic hurt that people learned to live with simply because they had no other choice. Faced with threadbare safety nets and a cultural ethos championing nationalist myths of self-sufficiency, many people did what human have always done in times of need: they sought emotional comfort and material aid from their family and friends. But when COVID-19 hit, relying on our immediate networks was not sufficient. Americans were gaslit into thinking that that are immeasurably strong, impervious to the challenges people in other countries face. In reality, our social and economic support systems are weak, and many people are made vulnerable by nearly any change in the capacity to earn a living. The fallout from the pandemic is an urgent call to strengthen our aid systems.”

 

The thesis fails from unnamed collectives: “countless Americans … people… many people… Americans… people in other countries… many people...” It offers not a single measure, no statistical survey, no validated polling. 

 

I point out that nationalism is not individualist. I might accept that the myth of personal self-sufficiency may be found nationwide. I must insist that nationalism denies personal self-sufficiency and insists on the integration (or total absorption) of the individual into the nation (as defined by its self-identified leaders). 

And individualism is not a myth; it is fact of life. 

"In his apologia for chemistry, The Same and Not the Same, (Columbia University Press, 1995) Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann asserts that no two hemoglobin molecules are identical. So-called “identical twins” are not. Individualism is objectively real: both empirically knowable and rationally explainable." On my blog here.

People who receive intense family care and people who benefit from the highest levels of professional medical care in a hospital still die. They give up. The time comes when you decide. You make the choice that no one else has the right to make for you. And every moment of every living day, you decide to make the best of your life, regardless of your circumstances.[2] 

 

Moreover, during the pandemic, hobbyist markets have flourished. In amateur astronomy, we found sales exploding. Millions of other people returned to reading, walking, and other pastimes. These are personal pursuits, edifying and enjoyable. Millions of parents learned to get along with their own children and to appreciate the teachers on whom they previously had inflicted their brats. There was no shortage of the very family life which the collectivists had long complained that work outside the home was destroying. 

 

I confess that I had to read the introduction to Nelson's phillipic several times over several days before I understood “gaslit.” Then just to be sure, I googled it. It is a neologism, a trope from a 1944 movie that only became vernacular in popular writing from about 2016. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting.) That being the assertion, who then is the villain? Who is robbing the unnamed collectives and what is being taken from them? 

Ultimately, you can only steal from individuals. That speaks to a deeper fallacy: the stolen concept. You cannot have theft without property: even a landlord is debarred from transgressing the renter’s “quiet enjoyment.” Quiet enjoyment is an economic value that can be stolen. So, what is missing here? And while it is theoretically possible that lacking any other motivation except your pain your landlord could set up loudspeakers and blast Wagner into your home, it would be bizarre. Most landlords only do things that make them money or prevent losses. So, who is getting the money from gaslighting Americans into believing that we can make decisions that result in our happiness? Are the perpetrators Runner's World, Sky & Telescope, and Papercraft Essentials? 

 

Speaking to the deeper point, if engaging in new hobbies makes us happier and perhaps morally better, is it gaslighting? I think that we are being gaslit into believing that we are unhappy in order to rob us of money to pay college professors at public universities who tell us that we really are unhappy despite all evidence to the contrary. (For some point-counterpoint on the subject, put "happiness conservatives liberals" into your search engine.) 

 

Social facts being complicated, it is also true that many people did and do suffer from the strain on the healthcare system: the providers themselves. Their plight does not appear in Robin G. Nelson’s article. (See "The Forgotten Man of Socialized Medicine" by Ayn Rand.)

In a second illogical attack on personal freedom, Dr. Robin Gair Nelson strikes at the root of American exceptionalism by conflating our chosen virtues with our inherited sins. “Since this country’s inception, the dominant ideologies here have encouraged not only individualism but also the dehumanization of certain groups, as evidenced by the enslavement of Black people and the displacement of Indigenous communities from their ancestral lands. This dehumanization continues today in the form of the bootstrap narrative—the myth that anyone can prosper if only they work hard enough—and in efforts to weaken relief programs for people who need help.”

 

She does not parse those dominant ideologies. One of them was collectivist. Way back then, correctly stated individualism would have ended slavery and recognized the property rights of the people who were here first. Collectivist thinking based on incorrect epistemology caused those evils and many others. In point of fact Article I Section Nine of the Constitution contemplated the end of slavery after 1808 and allowed the imposition of a tax on the importation of slaves until then. As the Supreme Court ruled in a different case: The power to tax is the power to destroy. Apparently, since this nation’s inception we were intent on destroying slavery, and that is why we eventually fought a civil war over it. 

As for the Native Americans, as long as the trespassers were only individuals who chose the harsh frontier over the comforts of village and city life, the Natives usually won any battles. They struck hard and terribly. The theft of their lands was possible only because of the collectivized action of a central government that had no intention of keeping its promises. That is quite different from the bourgeois ethics of individualism.

 

One way or another, we all have bootstraps. It is true that some inherit their very nice boots including four generations of wealthy African-Americans. (See Our Kind of People by Lawrence Otis Graham. In an episode of The West Wing, the staff writers are in a quandary over Republican resistance to escalating the estate tax because it also would penalize the first  generation of African-American millionaires.) Envying them and being jealous of their status will not provide you with the intellectual tools required to make your own or to pull yourself up by whatever you do have. Some of the answers are hidden in books like Think and Grow Rich, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Rich Dad Poor Dad and Benjamin Franklin’s collected aphorisms published as “The Way to Wealth.” You can read about Madam C. J. Walker, Maggie Lena Walker, Steve Jobs, or Steve Forbes. 

 

From reading the theories of the arch-capitalist economists of the Austrian School, I am willing to believe (provisionally) that financial success is ineffable: it must be learned and cannot be taught. Working hard is absolutely required and yet alone is not enough. Knowing the principles of accounting may be necessary but insufficient. Finding a thriving market or a floundering one that will reward nurturing may both be exploitable alternatives or failure modes. 

 

Nelson closes her complaint with a demand: “Committing ourselves to upholding our evolutionary mandate to help one another—not just the people we see every day but everyone everywhere—is the only thing that will save us.” 

 

If helping one another is our evolutionary mandate, then it must be beyond our choice. If it is not, then by what standard is it required by evolution? Evolution required that people who have diabetes live long enough to have children and we have people with family names like Drinkwater and Passwater. Yet we are investing billions of dollars to overthrow that evolutionary mandate. 

• https://professional.diabetes.org/research-grants
• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26798117/

 And that is just Type 1. It may well be the case that the other types are remediable and preventable with common sense diet and exercise. Or would Professor Nelson prefer that we follow our evolutionary mandate to let the infirm die off lest they degrade the gene pool? In The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski tells of the Bakhtiari tribe who even in modern times  leave behind any individual who cannot by their own power cross a swollen stream. The right answer to that question begins with the assumption of individualism: each individual is important to the survival of the tribe, including (and especially) the one who does not want to belong to any tribe.

 

Tribalism also underlays Amy Cooter’s essay. The militias are clearly tribal and define themselves in those terms of “we versus they.” Yet within that is a strong strain of individualism, self-dependence and self-sufficiency. Dowsing the militias with the individualism they recognize would defuse their desire for collective action. Instead of storming the Capitol, they would “go Galt” and just leave the society that has rejected their values. I suspect that Amy Cooter, Robin Nelson, and the editors at Scientific American would not be happy with that and would prefer that everyone just go along with their plans. 

 

Notes

[1] Reflexes speak. There was one time working security, we made regular bank deposits, pretty much the same time, same place, unarmed and unarmored. I was in the bank with my partner, being vigilant and the left side of my brain said, “If guys with guns came in right now, I would knock her to the ground and cover her with my body.” And the right side of my brain said, “Marotta, she would knock you down and cover you because is the better officer.”

[2] It is fully consistent and epistemologically integrative that Dr. Robin Gair Nelson extols the tribal values of the Navajo Nation for their immunization campaign. Apparently, those individuals were unable to make the right choices. Unlike the WEIRD people (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rational, Democratic), the Navajo Nation has no tradition of individualism.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

The Scientific Method 

The Science of Liberty 

Michael Schermer’s Moral Arc 

The Influence of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism 

Modes of Survival

Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security 

 

The Fountainhead: an exploded view of one scene

We lose the past too easily. Ayn Rand was born in 1905. In The Fountainhead, anyone of mature professional status 1922-1942 would have been a generation older. Rand studied in an architect’s office, working for free in order to understand the craft and the business. I was pleasantly surprised to be informed by another book of an underlying tradition in engineering design. It was an eye-opener.

From The Fountainhead:

“You will kindly explain yourself,” [said the Dean].

“If you wish. I want to be an architect, not an archaeologist. I see no purpose in doing Renaissance villas. Why learn to design them, when I will never build them?” [replied Howard Roark].

“My dear boy, the great style of the Renaissance is far from dead. Houses of that style are being erected every day.”

“They are. And they will be. But not by me.”

“Come, come, now, don’t be childish.”

“I came here to learn building. When I was given a project, its only value to me was to learn to solve it as I would solve a real one in the future. I did them the way I’ll build them. I’ve learned all I could learn here—in the structural sciences of which you don’t approve. One more year of drawing Italian post cards would give me nothing.” 

 

From The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski, Alfred A. Knoff, 1990:

Although orthographic projection was used in Albrecht Dürer’s 1525 book on the geometry of drawing, and theoretic foundations were laid down in Gaspard Monge’s 1795 book on descriptive geometry, the techniques and conventions derived from the work of these pioneers did not become universally employed in what has come to be known as mechanical or engineering drawing until the nineteenth century, when it became virtually indispensable for conveying information to machine shops and iron foundries. Up until about the middle of the nineteenth century, engineering drawing was learned in the long tradition of architectural drawing, and many early machines, such as large steam engines, were designed with iron structural elements cast in the forms of columns of the classical orders. Functional brackets were adorned with the classical motifs that students had learned in drawing classes, which consisted largely of copying increasingly complex architectural drawings, and one can only speculate on how much of what came to be known as Victorian architecture and structure was influenced by this practice. 

 

Through the middle of the nineteenth century architectural drawing was learned by most, though not all, draughtsmen by tracing. Hence technique was learned at the expense of theory. …  The mid-nineteenth century state of the art of engineering drawing was recorded succinctly in the preface to one of the earliest textbooks on the subject, An Elementary Treatise on Orthographic Projection, Being a New Method of Teaching the Science of Mechanical Engineering by William Binns. According to Binns…:

“… the usual mode of teaching… is from the ‘flat’—that is, from copy—the practice being to lay before each student of the class a drawing of some part or parts of a structure which he is requested to copy. This being done, another drawing, probably more elaborate, is laid before him; and the same course is pursued until he becomes tolerably expert with his instruments and brushes, and eventually able to make a very creditable or even highly finished drawing from copy. If, however, at the end of one or two years of practice the copyist is asked to make an end elevation, a side elevation and longitudinal section of his black-lead pencil, or a transverse section of the box containing his instruments, the chances are that he can do neither the one or the other.”

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Genius of Design 

Science Fair: A National Geographic Film 

Absolutes and Objectives 

There Really Are “Civil” Engineers 

 

 

 

I Quit Meetup

I sent this to CivicAction@Meetup.com and to the Austin #Resist when I received a Meetup request from them.  I also sent it to the organizers of the groups that I belonged to, most of them for computer users.

I am cutting my access to all of my Meetup groups and to Meetup.com as of February 28, 2017, in response to a corporate decision by Meetup to support the Resist political action collectives. 

“We decided that we wanted to do more to support these efforts so we created a network of 1,000 #Resist Meetup groups with a few special characteristics.” --
https://www.meetup.com/help/article/2736376/

 While I am sympathetic to many of the social justice causes pursued by Resist, I must object to Meetup’s delivering a special value to them. My comrades on the right wing also have advanced the cause of freedom. Their methods and their successes do not grab headlines.  It is a matter of culture.

What are the politics of pasta?

As collectivists, my progressive comrades form strong groups, and groups are easy to see. They grab headlines when they grab other people’s property. But that property had to be created first. The exceptionally great wealth of America was the work of millions of individuals who mostly minded their own business, making their own lives as best they knew how by the standards they chose according to their personal values. That does not make the home pages of news media – unless it is to “doodle” in celebrating the historical birthday of a dead writer, musician, inventor, or scientist.

Meetup.com is a tool for those conservatives, libertarians, and Objectivists who advance the ethics and politics of individualism.  By creating new, no-cost platforms for one political group, Meetup.com of necessity excludes those of other political beliefs – and those groups with no political agenda. It is also a platform for millions of individuals who share personal – sometimes peculiar – interests of their own, far removed from politics. And that speaks to a fundamental problem with progressive causes.

It is critical that this be understood. Dr. Martin Luther King looked forward to a future in which each person is judged by the content of their character.  But character is an attribute of a person, not of a group. 

The Pursuit of Happiness is selfish.

Choosing not to do business with someone because they are not from your ethnic, social, gender, class, or religious group is irrational.  But freedom of association is a fundamental political right. While my collectivist comrades try to eliminate discrimination by engaging the power of the state, my friends on the right go to the root of the problem: lack of character.

If the owners of Meetup.com want to end social injustice, they should empower their customers who meet to build character. But that would mean creating a 1000 special groups for some religions or some philosophies in preference to others.  And there is no way to parse that, because, after all, even karate builds character.

Therefore, I will delete my Meetup account and switch to some other service or set of services, such as Google Groups, which, in fact, evolved from the age-old Usenet maillists.  Ultimately, no one needs Meetup.com. That is something to keep in mind.

Michael E. Marotta

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
The Science of Liberty
Liberty's Kids
Money as Press and Speech
Libraries of the Founders

Syriaphobia: the latest fad in collectivism

It has been claimed that at least one of the terrorists of Paris November 13 hid among Syrian refugees to gain entrance into Europe. On the basis of that, some (Republican) governors of American states have declared that they will not accept Syrian refugees sent to them by the federal government. But immigrants to America have been associated with crimes since 1492. Immigrants also bring enterprise, initiative, invention, and, most of all, descendants.

 

Michael Ansara,
perhaps best known for his role 
as Cochise in Broken Arrow, 
was also Star Trek's Kang, 
above as "Soldier" 
from The Outer Limits.

In the wake of the French Revolution, Federalists and Republicans both supported and opposed the immigration of French refugees, depending on who was referring to whom.  To the Federalists, the French Revolution was the expression of everything evil in democracy.  However, many of the refugees were aristocrats, fleeing the Terror.

(And that is another point for another essay: Terrorism, as we understand it today, was invented by a native government. The Reign of Terror was not imported from Arabia.) 

Those aristocrats were worrisome for the Republicans whose sympathies were with the Revolutionaries. However, the Revolutionary government of France sent spies. Its envoys interfered in American politics,  attempting to influence our foreign policy. For all of that, and more, see the website of the Office of the Historian of the U.S. Department of State here. 

 

Anousha Ansari, entrepreneur,
ISS astronaut
and co-founder of the
Ansari X-Prize.

Long established as proper Bostonians, the English in America were appalled by the Irish immigrants of 1848. They lived like animals, bred like animals -- and bred crime. Or so the English of Boston claimed. Among the consequences of Irish in America was the cliché of the Irish cop, established following the War Between the States, and enduring even today. Another cliché was the Irish army sergeant. 

Many had enlisted in the North and South in order to obtain military experience that they could take home to fight Great Britain. Many more stayed here. And their descendants supported terrorism for over 150 years. With the founding of Sinn Fein in 1905, evermore American money flowed into the conflict. 

We worry today about Arab Americans and Islamic Americans supporting terrorism now, but no one was concerned when “professional Irish” in America paid for revolution in Ireland and terrorism in the United Kingdom. 

Like Boston and New York,
Cleveland was a center of Finnianism.

They were not alone. In the 1930s and 1940s, both Nazi Germany and Communist Russia maintained huge networks of supporters. It is also quite likely that the USSR insinuated its agents into the stream of European refugees from World War II. Similarly, communist agents probably were among the Vietnamese. We know that China sends its operatives in as students. Disturbing as that is to consider, actual harm is harder to prove.

Homegrown socialists, whether Fascist, Bolshevik, or others were common enough. Our coinage of the era should appear shocking to any thinking person today. It was not an accident: many progressives and intellectuals of the late 19th through mid-20th centuries were collectivists. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the clones were named after great collectivists of the times, Polly Trotsky, Lenina Crowne, and Benito Hoover, and others. In our time, the political leaders charged with defeating ISIL actually share many of its philosophical foundations: mysticism, revelation, altruism and collectivism, and ascetisim.

Fasces on American dime 1917-1945. German half mark and US quarter dollar.

Among the spies for the USSR was Samuel Dickstein, a US Congressman and New York Supreme Court justice. Meanwhile Prescott Bush, scion to the presidents of our time was able to get out of being implicated in a Wall Street Coup against President Roosevelt.  The German-American Bund pushed the Nazi Party line here at home. It only resulted in more anti-German sentiment.  Unlike the Japanese, the Germans were not put in concentrations camps - it was a possibility. In the movie Wings, about World War I, when the comic German, Arnold Schwimpf enlists with his buddies, the recruiting sergeant (an Irishman) says, "If you ask me, all you Dutchmen ought to be locked up until this thing is over." Those were heady times.  And America survived.

Civilization will survive ISIL.

Ayn Rand used the term “muscle mystic” (likely invented by Nathaniel Branden) to explain people who worship brute force. They thought that seizing factories would make them productive. They saw goosestepping rows and columns followed by arrays of tanks and mobile artillery, and accepted that whoever brandished them must be strong. In fact, reality and reason required that the Nazis and Communists would fail. So, too, is ISIL's program ultimately unworkable.

According to the news reports now about the Paris bombings, this murder of 180 people was carefully planned and executed over months.  Over 700 million people live in Europe, about 68 million of them in France. A million years will not be enough time for the terrorists to kill everyone they dislike.

Meanwhile, immigrants to Europe and the USA and everywhere else bring valuable human capital away from ISIL.

Yes, some may be criminals, as were the boys at Five Points, the Purple Gang, and the Mafia. It is a fact of human population distribution, however, that there must be at least as many Kennedys, Reagans, Einsteins, Fermis, Scalias, and Ayn Rands. And the creative work of good people outlasts  the destruction by evil people. 

It is an axiom of criminology that "crime knows no neighborhood." In other words, no place, no population is especially criminogenic. Crimes are committed by individuals who make bad choices. That is why Dr. Martin Luther King's dream was a world where a person is judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. The basic error, the fundamental fallacy, is considering masses of people as collectives. Including or excluding groups, tribes, ethnicities, etc., is the wrong way to consider the question. In point of fact, US immigration policy requires each legal immigrant to prove their case on their own merits. That is appropriate. 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Libertarians and Racism

A Man's Home is His Market

Laissez-faire Criminology

The Ferengi Rules of Commerce

Why Democracy is Difficult

If you run the Declaration of Independence through a grammar and style checker, you will find that it takes a modern college education to understand.  I would argue that most of today’s graduates do not understand it, but perhaps that is only from the lack of trying.

The founders of our republic were not average.  They were successful merchants and farmers and craftsmen.  George Washington was a surveyor.  (Quick: what is the square root of three?  A surveyor has memorized that as securely as most literate Americans have memorized the letter after R.)  If you drink beer you know the Sam Adams brand. It seems common enough, until you extrapolate from zymurgy to genetic engineering.

Jonathan Trumbull's
Signing of the Declaration of Independence
from the Library of Congress website

Karl Popper’s ringing plea, The Open Society and Its Enemies, was an appeal to ignorance. We do not know everything. Indeed, we cannot. New discoveries reveal that what we know today might not be true tomorrow.  Against that the fascists and communists of Popper’s time and the jihadi of our own offer intransigent commitment to claims of absolute certainty. Thus, the collapse of Arab Spring led to the rise of ISIS.

But an alternative exists.  Reality, reason, egoism, capitalism, and romanticism comprise the parameters of philosophical objectivism.  Ayn Rand’s capital-O Objectivism is just one expression of that. The broader philosophical objectivism, i.e., rational-empiricism, is the foundation of political freedom and social tolerance. 

But it is not easy, and nothing in the stars says that it must be. When Ptolemy I Soter complained to Euclid that geometry was difficult, the latter said that there is no royal road. In other words, there is no way to make this easier. Thinking is hard work.  It is easy to condemn the physically lazy, but no special sin exists for the intellectually slothful—except, of course, sloth itself.  Among the Texas State Guard, my email sigline is “Sapientia ardua est.”

Widespread intelligence and education are the basis for political freedom.  Of axiomatic necessity, most people are average.  Therefore, it might be argued that it takes a committed engagement by an intellectual elite to bring about a better form of government. However, the Flynn Effect posits that we are all smarter now than our ancestors of 100 or 200 years ago.  Maybe we just are not applying our intelligence to the right problems.

 

Created for an article that I wrote:
"Did Thomas Jefferson Wear
Mirrorshades?"
(Loompanics, 1991)

On my Macintosh, I have Word 2008, and its Spelling and Grammar checker seems to have a ceiling of 12^th grade. Nothing scores more difficult.  So, I ran the Declaration of Independence through several readability engines available on a website created by one Brian Scott. (“ReadabilityFormulas.com is a non-commercial ‘passion project’ created by freelance writer Brian Scott. The website offers free information and tools to understand readability formulas.  Visit Brian's other websites, LousyWriter.com and FreelanceWriting.com.”)

  

FIRST TWO PARAGRAPHS

Readability Consensus 

Grade Level: 19

Reading Level: difficult to read.

Reader's Age: College graduate

LONG TRAIN OF ABUSES

Readability Consensus

Grade Level: 23

Reading Level: very difficult to read.

Reader's Age: College graduate

LAST THREE PARAGRAPHS

Readability Consensus

Grade Level: 16

Reading Level: difficult to read.

Reader's Age: College graduate

Modernizing the presentation does lower the readability to grade 7.8.  Now it resembles Peter Norvig’s PowerPoint presentation of the Gettysburg Address (here).

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

• All men are created equal.
• They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.
• Among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
• To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.
• Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
• Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.
•  The people may institute new Government.
• The foundation of the new Government rests on such principles as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
• The Government should organize its powers in such form.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Science of Liberty

Liberty’s Kids

Contradictions in the Constitution

The Rational Optimist and the Grand Complication

Where the Only Law is Right

Back In The Saddle Again Recorded by Gene Autry Written by Ray Whitley and Gene Autry C               G7      C     I'm back in the saddle again F                       C      Out where a friend is a friend           F            Where the longhorn cattle feed        C            A7             On the lowly Jimson Weed D7                     G7                   I'm back in the saddle again C          G7         C       Riding the range once more F               C      Toting my old forty-four.           F   Where you sleep out every night           C           A7   And  the only law is right D7          G7      C      Back in the saddle again        F Whoopi-ty-aye-oh     C Rocking to and fro                    G7   Back in the saddle again  C      F               C  Whoopi-ty-aye-yay I go own my way  D7          G7      C   Back in the saddle again Chords for guitar from County Classic Song Lyrics.  [Lyrics edited - MEM]

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

From Texas to the Moon with John Leonard Riddell

A Forensics Bibliography

Central Texas Bee Rescue

A Visitor from the CIA

Back in the Saddle Again

Apollo 11: Task Accomplished

"That we had seen a demonstration of man at his best, no one could doubt—this was the cause of the event’s attraction and of the stunned numbed state in which it left us. And no one could doubt that we had seen an achievement of man in his capacity as a rational being—an achievement of reason, of logic, of mathematics, of total dedication to the absolutism of reality."-- Ayn Rand

Celebration at Mission Contol.
Note that the banner says "Task Accomplished"
but no day follows the month in the date.

Completing my master's I had a class in advanced criminology theory.  The professor, Gregg Barak, prided himself on engagement; and he varied his approaches to the material from class to class.  Our semester, we read post modernism: so-called "science" is only a Euro-centric, phallo-centric narrative denying voice to oppressed peoples. The scientific method, according to them, does not work and is not how scientists actually accomplish whatever it is they do.  My reply - which brought neither agreement nor denial from my classmates, only disinterested stares - was that when the elevator technician tunes the drive motors that bring us to the seventh floor without fail, she does not rely on an arbitrary narrative. And if the elevator should fail, a fail-safe mechanism prevents us from falling to our deaths, again, not a mere choice of ideological symbols. 

The supreme achievement of the Apollo missions - and the NASA space program in general; and, in fact, the entire global enterprise of space - is a singularity symbolizing all of the very many achievements the we create every day.  We deliver these to each other in exchange and all parties benefit incrementally.  We take that for granted.  But every now and then, it helps to ponder and reflect on the depth and complexity of our time spent at work.

Aboard the International Space Station July 19, 2013

Four page excerpt from "Apollo and Dionysus" from The Ayn Rand Reader by Gary Hull and Leonard Peikoff on Google Books here.
The recorded original lecture "Apollo and Dionysus" on the website of the Ayn Rand Institute here.

You Only Have to be Better to be Equal

She’s Such a Geek: Women Write about Science, Technology, and other Nerdy  Stuff, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders, eds., (Seal Press, 2006) is an anthology of autobiographical vignettes.  In each, you meet a woman.  Some are introduced as girls.  One enters when she was a man.  Overall, each found fun, validation, achievement, intellectual challenge and social challenge in her attraction for science, technology, engineering or mathematics.  Generalizations are not easy.  These are 24 insightful essays from a field of over 200 entries.  As a guy myself, I do not get much chance to spend all the time I want with two dozen female nerds.  This is highly recommended.

Over on Prof. Mark Perry’s blog, Carpe Diem (now with the American Enterprise Institute) are numbers about the huge gender gap in the SATs, the Scholastic Aptitude Tests that figure so largely in college admissions.  The reality of the gap is unarguable. So are the social policy implications.  On the almost-free market blog, OrgTheory, is a link about gender bias in science research hiring.  Even women who head labs preferentially hire and pay men in excess of women with equal qualifications. 

The full depth and breadth of prejudices active in our society is astonishing and disappointing.  While Asians tend to score higher on SATs than Caucasians, they need to: the averages are that an Asian needs to be 140 points higher to get into the same college program as a non-Asian.  The fear is that we will have “too many” in college, as 100 years ago Ivy League WASPS worried about having too many Jews and limited their enrollment, despite their qualifications.

 After California forbade state universities to consider race in admissions, the percentage of Asian students at the University of California at Berkeley rose from 37 percent to 44 percent. At the California Institute of Technology, which similarly doesn't look at race, more than one-third of students are Asian.

Asian-American students who enrolled at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina in 2001 and 2002 scored 1457 out of 1600 on the math and reading portion of the SAT, compared to 1416 for whites, 1347 for Hispanics and 1275 for blacks, according to a 2011 study co-authored by Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono. Read here: Asians are the New Jews

Incidentally, SAT scores are at a 40-year low.  (Washington Post here.) But do not blame public education.  Soviet agriculture almost worked.  Maybe this experiment just needs to run a little longer, too… 

The widest policy implication is that our culture is collectivized to the point where individual achievement is difficult to perceive.  Should we adopt numbers in place of names?

Also on Necessary Facts:

• Nerd Nation: Danika McKeller, Natalie Portman, and Felicia Day 
• Nerd Nation 4.5: Miyiam Bialik
• Nerd Nation 4.0: Even GQ Says Smart is Sexy
• Nerd Nation 3.0: How Dungeons and Dragons Changed My Life