Political Discussion

Lee Newman said:
I think Government and Religion only give us guidance in how to respond to the issues. There are scientists, the media and others that help us understand the issues. One of the problems we face is that with the wealth of information available we have to personally vet the information more than ever. Although, even in the past, history and other materials needed to understand are written with, if not an actual agenda, the bias of the writer. True clean information has never been truely available but is less possible now.
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jaycee said:
As a scientist this is something I think about a lot. It's something that weighs on me as and individual and on my profession. It's my feeling and experience that science isn't valued highly. There's a web of reasons why.

For instance, in most organizations that contain both scientists and engineers, engineers earn 10-20% at the same professional level and with less education. Most environmental consultants are not scientist, but engineers. I think there is strong evidence that there has been a societal discrediting of science and scientists that has accelerated over recent decades; particularly post the Environmental Protection Act. Discrediting of science has always been a thing, but was mostly left to religious zealots. Religion, specifically evangelical Christianity, has been able to greatly influence political decisions in the U.S.

There are other factors. Americans now have a basic distrust in their government that (I think) is stronger post-Vietnam, post-Nixon, post-Iran Contra, post-etc. etc. Science is also viewed as inherently socialist. A better way to say it is anti-capitalist because it tends to cost money upfront; long before profits can be made off of what is learned / the knowledge that is gained.

Science has also become for-profit and because of the way academic thought has failed the average person. Science has not dedicated itself to using the language and energy necessary to speak to people outside of their disciplines.

Now, if you want to suggest that scientists are motivated by things other than science. I would agree with that statement. The fact is that scientist need to compete for very limited grant dollars, which are often very limited tax dollars. Most of us work on this "soft" money. It's just accepted and expected that scientists have this impermanence as a part of their lives. Some governments and some states value science more than others and those places tend to be where innovation and advancement of knowledge occur. To me these are ultimately societal choices and have everything to do with the policies put forth by our local and national governments.

Personally, I'm working in a place that I have some freedom to try and address the communication issue, and I'm trying to do so (as are many others). We are getting better at it, but we are scientists not graphic designers, not speech writers, not facilitators. We do all of those things but it's often not our natural state of being. So we need help. We need people in office who spend money efficiently and build important funding foundations. We need people with other expertise to be willing to work with us even though we don't have very much money. We also need the public to make the choice to keep their religion in the home, their politics in the booth, and be willing to interact with people and information they might not easily understand.
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I mean just with the Biden situation. I have to trust that all those world leaders were doing the right thing by putting pressure on the Ukraine to dismiss the prosecutor. What proof do I really have?

With Global Warming, yea I have listed to a bit of information, but don't really the grasp of everything. My information is really basic. Even when the data is there I still have to trust myself and others to get behind it.

With the school data. It struck me that they were all excited about being the top school. In my head I was like of course you are. It's one of a hand full of schools in the area that are upper middle class. Then they were praising margins of 2-3% percent. I mean that is within normal variance. It's not even a significant difference.


Things can get really complex and even on simple things we have to be able to be convinced. The reason that I brought up Religion and Government is that has typically been ways that have been used to generate a common identity to regardless of what data and reality tell us. It seems like identity is more of a motivating factor when people have low information regarding issues and even when they have high information for that matter.
 
jaycee said:
As a scientist this is something I think about a lot. It's something that weighs on me as and individual and on my profession. It's my feeling and experience that science isn't valued highly. There's a web of reasons why.

For instance, in most organizations that contain both scientists and engineers, engineers earn 10-20% at the same professional level and with less education. Most environmental consultants are not scientist, but engineers. I think there is strong evidence that there has been a societal discrediting of science and scientists that has accelerated over recent decades; particularly post the Environmental Protection Act. Discrediting of science has always been a thing, but was mostly left to religious zealots. Religion, specifically evangelical Christianity, has been able to greatly influence political decisions in the U.S.

There are other factors. Americans now have a basic distrust in their government that (I think) is stronger post-Vietnam, post-Nixon, post-Iran Contra, post-etc. etc. Science is also viewed as inherently socialist. A better way to say it is anti-capitalist because it tends to cost money upfront; long before profits can be made off of what is learned / the knowledge that is gained.

Science has also become for-profit and because of the way academic thought has failed the average person. Science has not dedicated itself to using the language and energy necessary to speak to people outside of their disciplines.

Now, if you want to suggest that scientists are motivated by things other than science. I would agree with that statement. The fact is that scientist need to compete for very limited grant dollars, which are often very limited tax dollars. Most of us work on this "soft" money. It's just accepted and expected that scientists have this impermanence as a part of their lives. Some governments and some states value science more than others and those places tend to be where innovation and advancement of knowledge occur. To me these are ultimately societal choices and have everything to do with the policies put forth by our local and national governments.

Personally, I'm working in a place that I have some freedom to try and address the communication issue, and I'm trying to do so (as are many others). We are getting better at it, but we are scientists not graphic designers, not speech writers, not facilitators. We do all of those things but it's often not our natural state of being. So we need help. We need people in office who spend money efficiently and build important funding foundations. We need people with other expertise to be willing to work with us even though we don't have very much money. We also need the public to make the choice to keep their religion in the home, their politics in the booth, and be willing to interact with people and information they might not easily understand.
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Pure science I trust. Grants and everything else gum that up, I agree. Science done for science’s is the purest knowledge we have. While I admire an attempt to communicate in layman’s terms... I’m not sure that it’s something that is gonna work.

I mean our current “leader” doesn’t read or make decisions for himself. He also invents his own truth and gets away from it.

I honestly trust the layman less than I trust government now. I think the system here is broken and I’m not sure it’s fixable. I think we’re too far gone.

I’m not gonna call any names, but I think when there are people who actually seem to believe the Wild West mentality is better than an actual society... I’m not sure I trust people to come up with an answer anymore.

I don’t think it will be just be the environment that leads to our extinction any more. I think we’re infecting ourselves too.
 
Dtknuckles said:
I mean just with the Biden situation. I have to trust that all those world leaders were doing the right thing by putting pressure on the Ukraine to dismiss the prosecutor. What proof do I really have?

With Global Warming, yea I have listed to a bit of information, but don't really the grasp of everything. My information is really basic. Even when the data is there I still have to trust myself and others to get behind it.

With the school data. It struck me that they were all excited about being the top school. In my head I was like of course you are. It's one of a hand full of schools in the area that are upper middle class. Then they were praising margins of 2-3% percent. I mean that is within normal variance. It's not even a significant difference.


Things can get really complex and even on simple things we have to be able to be convinced. The reason that I brought up Religion and Government is that has typically been ways that have been used to generate a common identity to regardless of what data and reality tell us. It seems like identity is more of a motivating factor when people have low information regarding issues and even when they have high information for that matter.
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I wholeheartedly agree with your last statement. I mean an election won with in variance can be called a landslide today. That’s just a sign that collectively we’ve lost a grasp on reality. The constant celebration of normal and mediocre is just another example.
 
Dtknuckles said:
I mean just with the Biden situation. I have to trust that all those world leaders were doing the right thing by putting pressure on the Ukraine to dismiss the prosecutor. What proof do I really have?

With Global Warming, yea I have listed to a bit of information, but don't really the grasp of everything. My information is really basic. Even when the data is there I still have to trust myself and others to get behind it.

With the school data. It struck me that they were all excited about being the top school. In my head I was like of course you are. It's one of a hand full of schools in the area that are upper middle class. Then they were praising margins of 2-3% percent. I mean that is within normal variance. It's not even a significant difference.


Things can get really complex and even on simple things we have to be able to be convinced. The reason that I brought up Religion and Government is that has typically been ways that have been used to generate a common identity to regardless of what data and reality tell us. It seems like identity is more of a motivating factor when people have low information regarding issues and even when they have high information for that matter.
Click to expand...

Yes, the identity thing is kind-of what I was referring to in some of my previous posts. I think people fall back on identities because it's easy and they've been directed / convinced to do so through long-running propaganda campaigns, but that is what scientific thought and approach can combat. Ideally it's about a shared understanding of how the world works through physics, chemistry, and mathematics. People often make the choice to interpret those things through the lens of religion, political affiliation, or economic theory.

Variance is a complicated thing to most people and when you are rewarded for having things look a certain way and not actually having them be that way then you can see why people don't want to think about how real or true a result might be. It's a lot easier to say we're doing great instead of saying we're probably doing alright, but we may not be that much better than these other schools or in previous years. We live in a TLDR world.

Global warming seems more confusing to people than it is. It's been made confusing on purpose in some cases, but most people already know all that they need to know to make informed choices. You don't have to know the ins and outs of global circulation models to understand the mechanisms for warming.

This is all people need to know to make decisions:
When you take geologic carbon (oil, coal), carbon in trees, carbon in soil, and through various processes convert that carbon into carbon gas it moves into a much more rapidly cycling system (the atmosphere). Because that increase in atmospheric carbon gas is capturing more of the sun's radiation the earth's surface is warmer. There are a host of downstream effects and positive feedback loops associated with that warming that lead to all of things people like to point to as impacts (melting ice caps, increased storm intensity, sea level rise, higher winter temps). Earth's climate also can change and is changing due to other things like how close we come to the sun each year, how much the earth wobbles on it's axis, and how much volcanic activity there is. But those factors take a lot of time (millennia) to change climate. Humans have managed to exploit natural resources so rapidly that climate is changing faster than at any time in earth's history, with the exception of a few cataclysmic events. These rapid changes have been observed. They have been measured. Some people will have enough resources to adjust to new climate realities. Many, many more people will not.

Sorry to turn this into the science discussion thread, but I wanted to see if I could summarize in a way that was only slightly too long to read.... and to Lee's point. I'm more optimistic that people can take in information and data and overcome propaganda / brainwashing. At a minimum, they have to be given the opportunity to fail and I don't think scientists, academics, industry, the government, or the media do a very good job at providing that opportunity.
 
jaycee said:
Yes, the identity thing is kind-of what I was referring to in some of my previous posts. I think people fall back on identities because it's easy and they've been directed / convinced to do so through long-running propaganda campaigns, but that is what scientific thought and approach can combat. Ideally it's about a shared understanding of how the world works through physics, chemistry, and mathematics. People often make the choice to interpret those things through the lens of religion, political affiliation, or economic theory.

Variance is a complicated thing to most people and when you are rewarded for having things look a certain way and not actually having them be that way then you can see why people don't want to think about how real or true a result might be. It's a lot easier to say we're doing great instead of saying we're probably doing alright, but we may not be that much better than these other schools or in previous years. We live in a TLDR world.

Global warming seems more confusing to people than it is. It's been made confusing on purpose in some cases, but most people already know all that they need to know to make informed choices. You don't have to know the ins and outs of global circulation models to understand the mechanisms for warming.

This is all people need to know to make decisions:
When you take geologic carbon (oil, coal), carbon in trees, carbon in soil, and through various processes convert that carbon into carbon gas it moves into a much more rapidly cycling system (the atmosphere). Because that increase in atmospheric carbon gas is capturing more of the sun's radiation the earth's surface is warmer. There are a host of downstream effects and positive feedback loops associated with that warming that lead to all of things people like to point to as impacts (melting ice caps, increased storm intensity, sea level rise, higher winter temps). Earth's climate also can change and is changing due to other things like how close we come to the sun each year, how much the earth wobbles on it's axis, and how much volcanic activity there is. But those factors take a lot of time (millennia) to change climate. Humans have managed to exploit natural resources so rapidly that climate is changing faster than at any time in earth's history, with the exception of a few cataclysmic events. These rapid changes have been observed. They have been measured. Some people will have enough resources to adjust to new climate realities. Many, many more people will not.

Sorry to turn this into the science discussion thread, but I wanted to see if I could summarize in a way that was only slightly too long to read.... and to Lee's point. I'm more optimistic that people can take in information and data and overcome propaganda / brainwashing. At a minimum, they have to be given the opportunity to fail and I don't think scientists, academics, industry, the government, or the media do a very good job at providing that opportunity.
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I mean in a very real way, the media has politicized science. So it’s only natural.

Do you think as a species, we can overcome all the obstacles and beat the coming cataclysm? In college I thought so. Not so much anymore.
 
Lee Newman said:
I mean in a very real way, the media has politicized science. So it’s only natural.

Do you think as a species, we can overcome all the obstacles and beat the coming cataclysm? In college I thought so. Not so much anymore.
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I don't know, but I'm not too worried about it.
I do think humans can survive. I think there are many things we can do to limit the severity of a collapse. I think that it will still take many many lifetimes for humans to be eliminated from the earth.

Do I think we'll do the right thing? I'm too skeptical to say yes, but there are enough economic drivers that we can do the right thing even if it's for the wrong reason at this point.

I'm more concerned about who gets to survive and who doesn't. If you lack resources and you need to move to another country or even somewhere different within your own how do you do it?

So much of our economy is tied up in real estate development and when land is lost or unlivable on a broad scale what happens to the financial system that we are all so bound to.

I'm not sure great suffering for some/many is unavoidable.

I'll also be dead when it all burns... which I'm slightly sad about
 
The best thing about reading the transcripts is that without the name identifiers you can't tell who is the native and non-native speaker.

This was one of my favorite lines
"Yes you are absolutely right. Not only 100%, but actually 100% and I can tell you the following..."

100% it works 100% of the time

Edit: it was "but actually 1000% the news source I copied from typo'd the 2nd 100
 
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jaycee said:
The best thing about reading the transcripts is that without the name identifiers you can't tell who is the native and non-native speaker.

This was one of my favorite lines
"Yes you are absolutely right. Not only 100%, but actually 100% and I can tell you the following..."

100% it works 100% of the time
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I thought it said 1000%

EDIT: But more to your sentiment. It read like AI trying to have a diplomatic conversation after having been taught how to avoid incriminating itself.
 
folsom_lives said:
I thought it said 1000%

EDIT: But more to your sentiment. It read like AI trying to have a diplomatic conversation after having been taught how to avoid incriminating itself.
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"I forced a bot to listen to 1,000 hours of Trump phone calls with foreign leaders and then asked it to transcribe a phone call of its own"
 
I was listening to the Freakanomics podcast this morning. The interview I heard was with Mary Daly chair of the San Francisco Fed. It was good to hear someone who is an economist, someone who deals with economic policy, talking about what the economy means to real people. She was very thoughtful.

One of the things I found troubling was this story she told about her nephew, who was beginning his freshman year in college. He called and asked her if his choice to become a Math teacher was a good economic choice. Her response was to tell him that it was about his lifestyle choices, and if being a math teacher made him happy, because he probably wouldn't be able to afford more than a small home and would sacrifice other comforts that someone who was a stock broker could afford (I'm paraphrasing). I think the response was logical and factual.

That doesn't seem OK to me. Why do we value the stock broker more than the math teacher? Is being a stock broker more challenging? Do you need to be smarter? Do you need to work harder? Is the value the stock broker provides to society greater than anyone else?

My gut reaction is a hard No, but I really don't know. What it seems to me is that there is an almost AI to the global economy? The economy values what is useful to the economy. Banking for instance. It's very black and white, yes and no, in its decision making. Of course, the reality of day to day life is much more complicated than yes and no decision making allows for. The economy is making judgements about this or that profession or industry being of this or that value when in reality we all need all professions all of the time for our lives to continue to improve.

Everyone earning the same amount of money makes just as little sense as the stock broker and math teacher disparity, but what is the mechanism for controlling disparity when value isn't tied to ability, or energy, or skill, or what service to society is provided.

I don't care that the stock broker has a really big house and a really fancy car, but I do care if the stock broker is more comfortable than the person that built their big house or car if that comfort isn't because of creativity or innovation, but because of tailwinds, their gender, what part of the country they live in, and/or an economic valuation of societal worth etc. etc.
 
jaycee said:
I was listening to the Freakanomics podcast this morning. The interview I heard was with Mary Daly chair of the San Francisco Fed. It was good to hear someone who is an economist, someone who deals with economic policy, talking about what the economy means to real people. She was very thoughtful.

One of the things I found troubling was this story she told about her nephew, who was beginning his freshman year in college. He called and asked her if his choice to become a Math teacher was a good economic choice. Her response was to tell him that it was about his lifestyle choices, and if being a math teacher made him happy, because he probably wouldn't be able to afford more than a small home and would sacrifice other comforts that someone who was a stock broker could afford (I'm paraphrasing). I think the response was logical and factual.

That doesn't seem OK to me. Why do we value the stock broker more than the math teacher? Is being a stock broker more challenging? Do you need to be smarter? Do you need to work harder? Is the value the stock broker provides to society greater than anyone else?

My gut reaction is a hard No, but I really don't know. What it seems to me is that there is an almost AI to the global economy? The economy values what is useful to the economy. Banking for instance. It's very black and white, yes and no, in its decision making. Of course, the reality of day to day life is much more complicated than yes and no decision making allows for. The economy is making judgements about this or that profession or industry being of this or that value when in reality we all need all professions all of the time for our lives to continue to improve.

Everyone earning the same amount of money makes just as little sense as the stock broker and math teacher disparity, but what is the mechanism for controlling disparity when value isn't tied to ability, or energy, or skill, or what service to society is provided.

I don't care that the stock broker has a really big house and a really fancy car, but I do care if the stock broker is more comfortable than the person that built their big house or car if that comfort isn't because of creativity or innovation, but because of tailwinds, their gender, what part of the country they live in, and/or an economic valuation of societal worth etc. etc.
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The simple answer is that the stock broker is closer to capital . Capital gets to write the rules. Also, the "benefits" he brings are more measurable.
 
Dtknuckles said:
The simple answer is that the stock broker is closer to capital . Capital gets to write the rules. Also, the "benefits" he brings are more measurable.
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I understand all of that.

I disagree that the "benefits" are more measurable.

My feeling is that when the same system that defines "benefit" is doing the measuring there's probably a bit of confirmation bias going on.

One of the reasons I like natural capital valuation is that it's a way to provide value estimates in dollar form for things like parks or clean water or a sense of security in your neighborhood. These are things that provide lots of economic benefit but they don't make anyone $ directly so they are not valued in traditional "benefit" measurements.
 
Dtknuckles said:
huh?
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It's accounting for services that are difficult to measure through traditional finance methods. Think about it this way. If there is a park in your neighborhood, what value (if any) does it bring to the people's lives in that neighborhood or in reverse if your community lacks a source of safe and reliable drinking water, how does that impact people's lives. Traditionally it's been used to describe the value of natural resources, but that thought is being extended.

Natural Capital Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services Project | System of Environmental Economic Accounting

The project “Natural Capital Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services” (NCAVES) was launched in 2017 with an aim to advance both the knowledge agenda and the development of policy-applications of environmental-economic accounting, and in particular for ecosystem accounting.
seea.un.org seea.un.org
 
jaycee said:
It's accounting for services that are difficult to measure through traditional finance methods. Think about it this way. If there is a park in your neighborhood, what value (if any) does it bring to the people's lives in that neighborhood or in reverse if your community lacks a source of safe and reliable drinking water, how does that impact people's lives. Traditionally it's been used to describe the value of natural resources, but that thought is being extended.

Natural Capital Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services Project | System of Environmental Economic Accounting

The project “Natural Capital Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services” (NCAVES) was launched in 2017 with an aim to advance both the knowledge agenda and the development of policy-applications of environmental-economic accounting, and in particular for ecosystem accounting.
seea.un.org seea.un.org
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So, for example, the way you would measure the value of a new park would be to look at ways people access recreation in their area and calculate the resources they spend to access that and attribute that value to the new park proposal as well as property value increases.
 
Dtknuckles said:
So, for example, the way you would measure the value of a new park would be to look at ways people access recreation in their area and calculate the resources they spend to access that and attribute that value to the new park proposal as well as property value increases.
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yes, those are possible parts of the calculation. Do people fish on the lake do they buy bait? Do the come to the town to eat after they walk in the park? How does it increase business and property tax? If something goes wrong what does it cost you? Are health care cost lower because more people bike and walk here?

instead of the does this make me money or cost me money, right now thinking.
 
There is apparently a $50,000 bounty for the name of the whistle blower. The news is reporting that the bounty has been issued by several prominent people they didn't list names.

Also, on the dark web of the alt right there is also apparently a bounty on the life of the whistle blower.

Scary to think about what happens if the whistle blowers name comes out. With Trump hinting at what they used to do to spies and people who commit treason and what not.
 
RenegadeMonster said:
There is apparently a $50,000 bounty for the name of the whistle blower. The news is reporting that the bounty has been issued by several prominent people they didn't list names.

Also, on the dark web of the alt right there is also apparently a bounty on the life of the whistle blower.

Scary to think about what happens if the whistle blowers name comes out. With Trump hinting at what they used to do to spies and people who commit treason and what not.
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We're so fucked.

I do not think he will go quietly or peacefully if he is impeached or if he is not re-elected. It's scary.

His obsession with the whistle blower is bone chilling.
 
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