My explanation for atheists is that they have never been exposed to anything but the most simplistic religious thought, and are too anxious to feel intellectually superior to religious people to seriously investigate anything that isn't condoned by the scientific hierarchy and their peers.
I hear this quite a lot, and I've never been pointed to where I can read some of the really good, deep religious thought. Certainly, some of it is interesting, but it's interesting in the same way mathematicians find it interesting to invent axioms that don't necessarily reflect reality and see what they can prove with them. As an actual reflection of meaningful, measurable reality, I haven't found a rational way of distinguishing between any religious assertions at all. It's tempting to shout that the emperor has no clothes, but maybe I'm missing some significant body of work.
His arguments are basically repeating what homeopaths say - that stuff about more dilute is stronger etc., then ridiculing it for:
- being counterintuitive (well, lots of the world including most of the really interesting bits of physics falls into that category),
Well, not just counterintuitive but logically broken. As he points out, how does one get water with a "clean slate" that doesn't have the "memory" of something else in it? Your use of the words "ridicule" and "counterintuitive" really belittle what is actually a very compelling argument. If I said that I could fill my lungs full of air and fly, would you laughing at me and pointing out that I was violating a number of basic principles of physics be a weak appeal to the fact that my claim was "counterintuitive" or a relatively damning indictment of my claim in the absence of other evidence?
- not fitting with our current understanding of physics (he's got something of a point there - it would be nice to be offered a plausible mechanism that could then be tested directly, however if something works, we don't always know exactly _why_ it works),
It's more than that. There are plenty of things that are true that we can't explain. Homeopathy goes farther than that. It doesn't just require a clever explanation. It would require a fundamental rewrite of chemistry and physics. You could hardly shrug my breath-holding flight results off as simply being "unexplained" if I basically said that modern physics was wrong (perhaps appealing to the destruction of gravity or buoyancy). You'd basically say that I was a crackpot and until I could conclusively demonstrate it, it would be totally irrational to give my claims any credit.
- not passing his double-blind test.
That's a rather crucial failing, don't you think? Does a phenomenon that goes away as soon as one tries to objectively measure it really count as an objectively extant phenomenon? I think not.
His only real contribution here is the double-blind test. Unfortunately you can't really disprove a correlation with such a test (and to be honest I've not looked into how you can possibly set up controls when testing something that is supposed to he 'holistic') - the best you can do is put some sort of bounds on how much of a correlation there is (or isn't).
No, you can't disprove it, but you can give it opportunity after opportunity to prove itself, and it has failed. So we're faced with a choice between believing something that's "counterintuitive" (read: violates known laws of chemistry and physics) and has been given ample opportunity to prove itself and failed, or simply lumping those claims in with all of the other "counterintuitive" claims that also seem not to be reflected in reality. I don't see how you can claim that it's difficult to set up controls for such a test. Just give some sick people the homeopathic remedy and give another set of people water. Do it in a double blind way. Unless it's confounded by the control group's water having fond memories of other medicines, you should see a difference between the two groups. If they're not statistically significantly different from one another, it's likely that the homeopathic remedy is no more useful than water. How is that so hard? We have the statistical tools to do it very well.
Further, you seem to think that there are good arguments that Randi didn't cover. Can you name some? As far as I can tell, he hit all of the high points.
It's the vehemence that I find the most interesting part of this (also why I don't usually bother with this, evolution debates or Gnome vs. KDE). Looking at some of the comments, it's almost as if some people are personally threatened by the idea of homeopathy - there's quite a bit of name calling rather than argument (garbage, quack, moron, fraud...). Of course, this _is_ slashdot.
No, it's not getting uppity about 'talking about something outside his field' as such (after all, it's outside everyone's field except homeopaths, and they are going to be biased!), it's more that he is _extremely_ solid on the sleight of hand stuff (he can say exactly what is going on, and can demonstrate it), and borrows that air of expertise to make it look as if he knows just as much about other subjects - it's kind of a sleight of hand in itself. It's kind of like Linus Torvalds opinions on the GPL2 vs. GPL3 being given a lot of weight - yes, his opinion is as valid as anyone else's, and he's got a lot invested in it, but I've seen a lot of people swayed because of who his other achievements rather than his arguments.
I don't think that's being fair at all. It's not as if he's making comments that are devoid of substance and resting on his laurels as a skilled magician to make his points. Not only are the points he makes completely valid, but he covers basically all of the objections to homeopathy out there, so the fact that he has made his name covering other issues is largely irrelevant. On top of that, given that he spends his life investigating crackpot claims like homeopathy, I'd venture to say that he's probably about as close to an expert on homeopathy's claims as anybody who isn't a homeopath. In fact, I'd guess that he knows more about the wide and divergent (and not necessarily consistent) claims of homeopathy than the average homeopath who only happens to know his particular version of the nonsense. I'm not sure where you get the impression that he's somehow using his other achievements as a crutch when you consider the fact that he's also likely to be at the top of the field of people who investigate homeopathy.
The simple question is, did he miss any arguments, or are any of his arguments invalid? I think it's no (or very nearly so) on both accounts, so it's hardly fair to call him on the carpet for what you're accusing him of. My response to your original post was simply keying off of the fact that you explicitly said that Randi's arguments were not good ones. You seem to have modified that to say either that Randi's arguments are not good because he's Randi, or that they're good arguments but people think they're better than they are because he's Randi (without pointing out any flaws, still), or that they're good arguments but somebody other than Randi should be presenting them because people might give him more credit than he's due. I'm really not sure.
As for homeopathy itself, there seem to be two groups of people involved in the debate - those who can't see any possible way it could work according to physics as we understand it currently, and those who use it and find it effective. Both sides are very passionate about it, which is why I've learned to stay out of that debate - mine was meant to be more of a side comment.
I suppose it's not uncommon for there to be a vehement disagreement between anecdotes and data. I know which side I come down on.
I really enjoyed his debunking of Uri Geller (which I think is how he started down the debunking track), and 'psychic' stuff, and he can certainly be entertaining, but his argument about homeopathy is a re-tread of "it doesn't fit our intuition, we don't have a mechanism, therefore it's wrong", with the addition of "because of this, let's equate it with the paranormal".
I think you're misinterpreting the arguments. It's more like, "It doesn't have a mechanism and it completely contradicts all established science, therefore they're going to need a serious evidence in order to be taken seriously." That's a perfectly valid argument. If a guy claims he can walk through walls (except when people are watching) and then throws out some quantum mechanics mumbo-jumbo, I'm going to call it a paranormal claim even though he tried to tie it loosely to known science.
I don't want to get into the arguments for or against homeopathy on here (I find that sort of argument on here a waste of time as no-one ever changes their mind that way), but I always get slightly irritated when I see someone who is an expert in a particular area using that as leverage to comment about a different area, hence my original comment.
So your issue is that he's getting uppity and talking about something outside his field, even though he knows as much about homeopathy as just about anybody else does (sadly). You seem to have jumped totally off the rails with respect to the fact that he's completely summed up all of the arguments about why homeopathy is basically garbage. The fundamental point is that it sounds nutty and would overturn all of our knowns physics, chemistry, and biology on the subject, so we're going to need more than somebody's say-so that it works. We're going to need actual evidence. It doesn't take a PhD in chemistry to point that out.
It sounds like it's time to do a long term double-blind study and come up with a valuable remedy and get rich, then. I can't imagine why this hasn't reached the mainstream if it's so clearly a miracle drug.
Placebo effect? Surely this is only effective when the person taking this "new treatment" expects it to work. How the hell does it work on someone like me who can't see how homeopathy could possibly work, with such ridiculously dilute solutions, water memory (give me a break), quantum entanglements (are you fucking kidding me?)
You're forgetting the second half of the Wizard's First Rule: People will believe anything if they want it to be true or if they're afraid that it might be. I'm a highly skeptical person and I often see very weird things going on because I'm trying extra hard to observe any changes, even though the more sensible parts of my brain tell me that nothing is going to happen.
Now, what you are asking is slightly different -- we should discount "scientifically bogus" therapies. Well, it is difficult. Without going into too much detail, there are numerous therapies that sound like total bunk, and work.
Well, there's a difference between being counterintuitive (or against principles that are believed to be true) and simply failing to produce results. Fortunately, homeopathy is both extraordinarily counterintuitive and a near complete failure at producing statistically significant results. I certainly wouldn't string anybody up for devoting some of (their own) hard earned research cash to it (although I'd probably laugh a bit), but there's also a difference between exploring something and selling it as a working product and taking money from dupes.
I'm getting frustrated these days as when I go out for medicated eyedrops or some similar OTC product, I have to double check the packaging to make sure I'm not paying $8 for a bottle of water. I hope that the homeopathy lobby gets together and creates some sort of snazzy "seal of approval" that they'll display prominently so I can quickly decide when a box isn't worth picking up to read.
There's a difference between people doing research, and outright fraud based on "homeopathic cures".
I'll take wasted research over outright medical fraud any day, but I can't say that I'm thrilled with the idea of public medical money that could have been spent on real medicine to help real people being wasted on nonsense like this.
It's not scientific at all, but when you see hundreds of dogs over several years come back from symptoms that usually mean certain death, there has to be something there.
The question isn't how many recovered, but rather how many still died, and is the ratio of death to recovery meaningfully different from no treatment at all? Simple observation without recording the results tends not to document those things and usually biases the results in favor of the surprising outcomes (ones that died were "too far along" but the ones that lived are remembered as miraculous recoveries). It's not surprising to find that as soon as the same thing is done in a controlled environment with good record keeping, the phenomenon disappears. That's why we don't approve medicines by anecdote.
There might well be some good arguments against homeopathy, but those of James Randi does not count among them.
Hmmmm... I don't know about that. I quit enjoyed Randi's talk about homeopathy and think that it did a great job of outlining the actual problems with it (e.g. zero active ingredient, no known basis for water to "remember" the ingredient, counterintuitive results if it were true, etc.). Can you mention some arguments that are good that he didn't cover, or are some of his arguments wrong? Or do you just dislike James Randi?
I'm curious. Why do you think that the Director of National Intelligence has so vehemently defended the unwarranted wire taps? It's not like he can take over the world. For that matter, it's likely that as soon as another Prez comes into office, he'll be out. Why do you think that so many in Washington believe that unwarranted wire taps are a good thing, as opposed to having to get a warrant for each and every one?
For the same reason all users want root access and nobody wants to have to show receipts to get reimbursed for company expenses. It's easier for them than simply following rules that exist for a reason, and of course they would never do something bad. For some reason it eludes them that even though they're brilliant and fine people who will always behave themselves, that's not necessarily true for everybody. Hence the rules.
That was the point. That's why an attack is worse than an accident. That's why attackers need to be stopped. Because accidents are just bad things that happen. Attacks are willful. An attacker will attack again, and he'll try to do an even better job next time.
That's true, but it completely misses the point of my response. The probabilities I'm talking about take all of the future attacks into account. Pile up all of the terrorist deaths and extrapolate it, and they're still basically nothing. Many attacks are worse than one accident. Many attacks and an equal number of accidents are equal. In the case of... well... reality, hardly any attacks are not nearly as bad as a lot of accidents. That's why I'm talking about risk and probability. You're jumping back and forth between comparing the "badness" of a single event vs all of those events combined when it suits you, but it just doesn't make any sense from a policy perspective. If the consequences of two events are equal, then those events are equally bad. If the consequences of two events are equal and the probability of on is infinitesimally small, then one of those problems is much worse than the other.
More to the point, you're still assuming that unless we remove all oversight, the number of terrorist attacks will somehow skyrocket to the point where it's a significant problem. I just don't see that being the case, especially when the best examples you seem to be able to come up with are ones like this one. Frankly, if there's a real problem that oversight somehow hampers our ability to stop terrorists, then we need to modify the process. I'm far from convinced that the only solution is to drop it entirely.
But you want the government to order people around to prevent pollution. Ordering people around is oppressing them directly. You want the government to fine and imprison people who disobey. Oppressing people is worse than watching them, even if watching can be a tool that oppressors use.
By some definition, all laws are a form of oppression. That's why we talk about them and decide which ones to enact. The level of surveillance they're asking for will enable oppression well beyond the "I can't dump my garbage into the drinking water supply" type of oppression you seem to be concerned with. Yes, I want the government to fine and imprison people who disobey all sorts of laws. Being uncomfortable with giving semi-competent and often unethical leaders broad reaching powers isn't the same as advocating anarchy. You're just playing games now.
You still seem to prefer your freedom to pollute over your right to privacy. I'm not sure what brings you to that interesting choice of priorities, but I'll leave you to it.
And the justification is to prevent bad things from happening based on numbers. And the numbers are based on... something. (Victims of terrorism have actual corpses. They're not numbers extrapolated from some advocacy pamphlet to push a cause.)
You seem to be denying that the results of any policy decision so subtle as pollution regulation or national speed limit could never be estimated by statistical means. I can only assume that you're not an actuary or an economist or somebody who otherwise deals with trends in data. Let me assure you that elderly people who die of respiratory problems correlated to the air that they breathe have very real corpses. Their deaths are just more commonplace and less spectacular, so our primitive herd sense for danger doesn't kick in to start the stampede.
Saving money saves lives too, BTW. That's part of the reason everyone goes and spends time at work. They're giving up part of their lives in exchange for money. Taking it from them is taking part of their life. I doubt you've figured this into the numbers.
That sounds better than all the hype and hysteria and noise we've all been hearing for such a long time. I'd think it would be at least a little embarrassing to be on the same side as the Code Pink people and all the rest of the wackos. But that's just an aside.
Code Pink's behavior at the recent hearings was shameful, but I really don't feel much connection with them just because I happen to think that they're right on a few topics. I'm sure I like some of the same foods as they do as well. We also probably agree that the sky is blue. I'll resist the urge to point out some of the creepier extremist fringes with whom you might share policy opinions.
There is testimony to that effect before the congressional committee.
What, specifically, was the best example? I didn't listen to the entire set of hearings, but I also didn't hear anything that convinced me that FISA was hopelessly broken and we'd be better off winging it.
Is there anyone who has offered any first-hand testimony to the contrary?
What would such "first-hand" testimony sound like? Examples of times when nothing went wrong, I suppose? More to the point, I would think that the burden of proof should be on the shoulders of the people who want to expand their power over the average citizen. I'm hardly a paranoid secessionist, but I certainly don't think that expanded police powers should be assumed necessary and safe unless shown to be otherwise.
Why don't the FISA judges have to testify?
I don't know.
This makes the same mistake that everyone makes over and over. An accident with a woodchipper is not the same as an attack. See my other post for an illustration of why.
I'm sorry, but your illustration is less of a reasoned illustration of a meaningful practical difference and more of an appeal to the emotions one feels as a result. Given the choice between a 10% chance of being hit by a car and killed and a 1% chance of being shot by a sniper, I'll choose the 1% chance any day. Nature gave us fear as animals to allow us to avoid scary and dangerous situations, but it's high time we started to use reason to avoid danger, because on large scales, it does a much better job. To make your example work, let's say that neighbor A is just as likely to hit more people and injure them as neighbor B is to attack future victims. In that case, they're both equally problematic and it is equally important that they're both stopped. The difference is that neighbor B is also morally culpable and should be punished. Likewise, the solutions for the two neighbors are different: one should be jailed and the other should have his driver's license revoked. There is no difference in the threat that they present. One might be more afraid of being badly beaten (I'm assuming that your analogy assumes that they're equally painful and caused equal damage), but that fear doesn't reflect reality--policy should. What you claim is a mistake is actually rational decision making based on probabilities and payouts.
People are notoriously bad at assessing risk. I remember an example thought experiment: Let's say it takes an average of 100,000 cigarettes to kill the average person. They're perfectly legal and a lot of people use them. If cigarettes were perfectly safe but 1 in every 100,000 exploded and blew your head off, there'd be congressional hearings, they'd be yanked off the shelves, and nobody would buy them. A spectacular death is scary, but an equally (or more) probable mundane death is ignored.
There's also a huge freedom question with all the regulations you seem to want. Not "wiretapping somehow indirectly impacts my freedom" but more along the lines of "do what we tell you immediately or we'll put you in jail". You seem to want to enable the latter to prevent accidents while guarding against the former which migh
This is just not true. You can have a hunch someone is involved in terrorism based on the fact that a terrorist associate is calling them. But you can't get a warrant on an unidentifiable person. You can't get a warrant on "whoever answers the phone when terrorist associate X calls". You can only get warrants on specific individuals.
Hence the "hot pursuit" clause and the ability to get a warrant after the fact. Presumably, they have the technology to tap any phone that has been called by a certain overseas number, or you wouldn't be bringing this up. If that's the case, you now have a lead and a person on whom to get a warrant, and you also have the ability and the legal authority to tap the current call while you wait for the warrant. Where is the problem?
This actually seems to not be true. It's easy to conclude this from the number of rejected warrants, but if you actually listen to what people say who try to get these warrants, they'll tell you that the rules prevent them from doing a lot of things. And it's not "I tried to abuse my power and was prevented", it's more like "we needed to listen to this conversation because we thought it might help us prevent an attack, but we couldn't get what we needed for a warrant".
I'd be very interested in seeing some examples. The very low number of rejected warrants implies that either they're very likely to be granted or the people requesting them have nearly psychic powers when it comes to knowing what will cause them to be rejected (or they're simply very conservative about asking for them). Either of the latter would surprise me quite a bit. Specifically what did the courts require that they weren't able to provide? That seems to be a crucial policy point and I haven't found any real information to back up the claim. Given our government's track record when it comes to locking up the wrong people, I'm more inclined to believe that they're doing a bad job of gathering evidence over the claim that the bar is unjustifiably high.
Disbelieve them if you want, but if you do, it would be good to know why.
Simply put, the lack of specifics. When requests for far-reaching power are accompanied by vague, hand-waving justifications, my ears perk up. If I'm going to grant the executive the potential power to spy on his political enemies, dissenters, and whistle blowers, I'd like to know that there's a good reason for him not to have anybody looking over his shoulder while he does it. Governments in general and our government specifically don't exactly have a strong record of using power responsibly when nobody is looking.
You're assuming the worst case, but you don't give the basis for that assumption. Why not assume a more reasonable case? Why not weigh the possibility of a terrorist attack against the possibility of a reasonable alternative?
I don't think I'm really assuming the worst case. I'm assuming a very likely case. Just off the top of my head, COINTELPRO started as an all-American program to stop the communists and quickly devolved into a program that included subverting the civil rights movement because it as all operating behind closed doors. One could argue that they meant well in the process, but that's an even more frightening prospect--what if they hadn't? I don't see any reason to believe that our executive branch has suddenly and permanently become benevolent philosopher-kings when in the past, they've been flawed human beings like the rest of us. I'm also not inclined to believe that the incidents we've seen of the executive branch abusing surveillance are the worst ones we're ever going see.
That's why I ask what people would choose if they had to be accountable. Someone who had to answer for their decisions might want to rethink whatever biases they have that would lead them to assume the worst case (or the best case, or any other case based on un-reality). There's actually room for reason, judgment, thoughtfulness, and the ability to make distinctions.
It's interesting that you should say that given that you have called some of the arguments against warrantless wiretapping abstract and academic. If we ran our government on how the fringe worst-case scenario made us feel emotionally, we'd be in a world of hurt. You can't make policy decisions based on the 0.1% bad case unless that case is absolutely catastrophic. The probability of the average American being killed by a terrorist is infinitesimal. The idea that we should base serious decisions on it is not any better basis for government than making decisions based on all sorts of skewed alarmist beliefs about bad things that could happen. We take minor risks every day for perceive
My point was not to deny anything that has or has not happened, but to say that I trust their judgment. If agents charged and sworn with protecting the good people of the USA deem it appropriate to detain foreigners without charge, then I'm not going to question it. Intelligence is a dirty business. War is even dirtier. Good will is not what these people understand. Action needs no translation.
If nobody gave me any clues as to when this was written, I could very easily be convinced that it was written about the internment of the Japanese. The people in charge back then were no different than the people in charge now: hardworking Americans with families and the security of their country at heart. Unfortunately, as you point out, war is a dirty business and fear can cause those people to make extraordinarily poor decisions.
Now when citizens start disappearing or the government starts to raid and burn down towns, then you'll have a point.
Well, for starters, Donald Vance "disappeared" for two weeks--long enough for his fiancee to contact her congressperson. Even after he was able to contact her, he was denied trial and representation for another 80+ days. I don't see any particular reason to think that his case is the worst that could possibly happen, given that the government is essentially claiming that they didn't have to let him go at all. Ever.
But for detaining 500 people, who are treated quite well, btw, at a military base in Cuba is no cause for alarm.
This made me pause. I don't know about your lifestyle, but I have a job, a wife, and a ~75 year life expectancy. If you kidnapped me in the middle of the night and swept me off to a hotel where I was massaged daily and fed foie gras but I could never get in touch with my family or leave the facility, I'd strongly consider murdering you and trying to escape after a few years. In fact, I probably wouldn't even feel bad about it. Being held incommunicado and without charge for years at a time under the best conditions isn't even a distant cousin of being treated quite well. If you haven't heard it, I strongly recommend listening to the This American Life program on the topic. It's an hour long, but it's free and it's really worth thinking about. Yes, there are bad people at Guantanamo. But our government's judgment about who to scoop up and what to do with them isn't nearly as good as you seem to think it is.
Agreed. However, I don't think our government has the ability to do anything without oversight, even if that oversight is the press.
There are a couple of problems with that. First, it's not clear to me that the press has always done a good job or is capable of doing that job under all circumstances. There's a difference between having a law that requires that information be turned over to an arbiter and having the arbiter legally locked out but given incentive to sleuth out the truth. What goes on in Guantanamo, specifically? The press doesn't know for sure. Who, specifically, was wiretapped and why? The press doesn't really know. In fact, even if they did, people would dismiss them because they're not really on the inside, so how can they be sure? Further, the press shouldn't necessarily know those things. Given the choice between having a judge take a look and give it the nod quietly and having to wait for the New York Times to plaster potentially sensitive information all over the front page, I'd choose the former.
Second, the oversight of the press is only good enough if the people in charge actually change their behavior when exposed. It appears to be getting harder and harder to shame our leaders into doing the right thing even after they're caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
If this came out of the blue, I'd see your point and agree. However,
Our hands were tied. Your family died. We didn't do everything we could. We didn't put much serious thought into it. We followed the rules. Don't blame us, we didn't write the rules. And privacy is important too. I know your children were killed in the bombing, but what if someone's innocent phone call was overheard?
The point of having a judge involved isn't to prevent the occasional tapping of the wrong person. It's to prevent widespread systematic abuses of power by one branch of government. That's why FISA warrants have always been practically a rubber stamp, and that's why a lot of us are concerned that our leaders seem to think that they're too much of an inconvenience. It's not that we're weighing the possibility of terrorist attacks succeeding against accidental wiretapping. We're weighing the possibility of terrorist attacks succeeding against giving a single branch of government unchecked power to tap phones and gather dirt on people--a power that they'll almost certainly abuse. That's a whole different ball of wax. Given what's actually at stake, yes, I would say that it's worth risking some lives over it.
We can come up with all the thought experiments we want. I've seen people try to come up with examples of terrorist plots that require tapping entire cities for months at a time. The simple answer is that some of those fringe cases can't be solved in the context of a free society. In those cases, we have a simple choice: Accept the possibility of being killed by a terrorist (probably comparable to being eaten by bears) or hand the government a power that it's practically guaranteed to start abusing. Terrorist carnage is a fringe case. Governments taking the powers given to them and using those powers to amass more power and squelch dissent is the norm. We need to factor that into the equations.
Nor is there so much as a syllable in the Constitution that prohibits the military from spying on the enemy. Nor would anyone have signed it if there had been.
I think that some might have if there had also been a provision allowing a single person to redefine "the enemy" to mean anybody they like.
Uh, I KNOW them, so of course I trust them. Besides, the "government" is made up of people. The FBI, CIA, IRS and so on are all made up of people.
You just responded to a post listing abuses that the government has committed by essentially saying that they're nice folks and would never do that sort of thing. I'm not sure what to think of that. I also know people who have worked in every intelligence agency that we have, and they're nice people and they eat popcorn and go fishing like the rest of us. That doesn't mean that governments in general and our government specifically don't have a long history of either bending the rules or outright abusing people.
My complaint (and, I think, the complaint that many other people have) is not that they insist on being able to eavesdrop on phone calls for intelligence gathering purposes, but the fact that they insist on having that power without any oversight. I'm all for giving law enforcement and intelligence agencies all the tools they need to do their jobs well provided there's adequate neutral oversight to prevent them from abusing those tools. When they insist that they need the tools but they don't want the oversight, and then they can't come up with a convincing reason not to have the oversight, a lot of us start questioning their motives. A guy trying to buy a truckload of dynamite should make you nervous. A guy who steadfastly refuses to show ID for the purpose should set off alarm bells.
History has shown us that when we stop requiring that people justify their exercises of power, they'll start using those powers in unjustifiable ways--even people who would otherwise have been honest folks with our best interests at heart under normal circumstances. As they say, locks keep honest people honest. So does accountability. I'd much rather see a system that's designed in such a way that those nice people are never tempted to become bad people. That way, everybody gets their job done and we can all remain friends.
...not cripple our selfs to satisfy middle class guilt about the environment.
I'm thinking that we might be better off if we stopped painting what may well be enlightened self interest as "middle class guilt." Burning all of my garbage may be the easiest way for me to get "rid" of it, but it kind of sucks if you're downwind from me, and it's certainly a bad call if everybody in the city decides to do it. Would pushing against everybody burning huge heaps of trash be an issue of guilt or simply good long term governance?
What other energy source is there? Please, clue me in! The answer is fusion! Now, I know that it's not "possible" right now. But, if we can blow a half a trillion on Iraq, why couldn't we take the next "blow" and do a systematic program to raise a generation of physicists, then, assign them to various aspects of the commercial fusion problem.
I just can't see why we can't just "get er done." Hell, the a-bomb was built in 4 years with 1940s technology, once we willed it.
I've been saying this for years. We went to the moon just for the hell of it using barely more than slide rules (yes, I understand the politics behind it, but seriously--it was basically a really cool dick-waving exercise). If you think about the amazing things that can be accomplished with just a fraction of our national resources (e.g. Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out that we spent more on lip balm during the 12 years of the Cassini program than we spent on the Cassini program itself) and what a tremendous amount of cash we waste doing spectacularly stupid things, it's hard to believe that we're not running a Manhattan Project every few years for something useful like nuclear fusion, supersonic passenger flights, etc.
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Well, not just counterintuitive but logically broken. As he points out, how does one get water with a "clean slate" that doesn't have the "memory" of something else in it? Your use of the words "ridicule" and "counterintuitive" really belittle what is actually a very compelling argument. If I said that I could fill my lungs full of air and fly, would you laughing at me and pointing out that I was violating a number of basic principles of physics be a weak appeal to the fact that my claim was "counterintuitive" or a relatively damning indictment of my claim in the absence of other evidence?
It's more than that. There are plenty of things that are true that we can't explain. Homeopathy goes farther than that. It doesn't just require a clever explanation. It would require a fundamental rewrite of chemistry and physics. You could hardly shrug my breath-holding flight results off as simply being "unexplained" if I basically said that modern physics was wrong (perhaps appealing to the destruction of gravity or buoyancy). You'd basically say that I was a crackpot and until I could conclusively demonstrate it, it would be totally irrational to give my claims any credit.
That's a rather crucial failing, don't you think? Does a phenomenon that goes away as soon as one tries to objectively measure it really count as an objectively extant phenomenon? I think not.
No, you can't disprove it, but you can give it opportunity after opportunity to prove itself, and it has failed. So we're faced with a choice between believing something that's "counterintuitive" (read: violates known laws of chemistry and physics) and has been given ample opportunity to prove itself and failed, or simply lumping those claims in with all of the other "counterintuitive" claims that also seem not to be reflected in reality. I don't see how you can claim that it's difficult to set up controls for such a test. Just give some sick people the homeopathic remedy and give another set of people water. Do it in a double blind way. Unless it's confounded by the control group's water having fond memories of other medicines, you should see a difference between the two groups. If they're not statistically significantly different from one another, it's likely that the homeopathic remedy is no more useful than water. How is that so hard? We have the statistical tools to do it very well.
Further, you seem to think that there are good arguments that Randi didn't cover. Can you name some? As far as I can tell, he hit all of the high points.
The simple question is, did he miss any arguments, or are any of his arguments invalid? I think it's no (or very nearly so) on both accounts, so it's hardly fair to call him on the carpet for what you're accusing him of. My response to your original post was simply keying off of the fact that you explicitly said that Randi's arguments were not good ones. You seem to have modified that to say either that Randi's arguments are not good because he's Randi, or that they're good arguments but people think they're better than they are because he's Randi (without pointing out any flaws, still), or that they're good arguments but somebody other than Randi should be presenting them because people might give him more credit than he's due. I'm really not sure.
I suppose it's not uncommon for there to be a vehement disagreement between anecdotes and data. I know which side I come down on.
So your issue is that he's getting uppity and talking about something outside his field, even though he knows as much about homeopathy as just about anybody else does (sadly). You seem to have jumped totally off the rails with respect to the fact that he's completely summed up all of the arguments about why homeopathy is basically garbage. The fundamental point is that it sounds nutty and would overturn all of our knowns physics, chemistry, and biology on the subject, so we're going to need more than somebody's say-so that it works. We're going to need actual evidence. It doesn't take a PhD in chemistry to point that out.
It sounds like it's time to do a long term double-blind study and come up with a valuable remedy and get rich, then. I can't imagine why this hasn't reached the mainstream if it's so clearly a miracle drug.
I'm getting frustrated these days as when I go out for medicated eyedrops or some similar OTC product, I have to double check the packaging to make sure I'm not paying $8 for a bottle of water. I hope that the homeopathy lobby gets together and creates some sort of snazzy "seal of approval" that they'll display prominently so I can quickly decide when a box isn't worth picking up to read.
That's true, but it completely misses the point of my response. The probabilities I'm talking about take all of the future attacks into account. Pile up all of the terrorist deaths and extrapolate it, and they're still basically nothing. Many attacks are worse than one accident. Many attacks and an equal number of accidents are equal. In the case of... well... reality, hardly any attacks are not nearly as bad as a lot of accidents. That's why I'm talking about risk and probability. You're jumping back and forth between comparing the "badness" of a single event vs all of those events combined when it suits you, but it just doesn't make any sense from a policy perspective. If the consequences of two events are equal, then those events are equally bad. If the consequences of two events are equal and the probability of on is infinitesimally small, then one of those problems is much worse than the other.
More to the point, you're still assuming that unless we remove all oversight, the number of terrorist attacks will somehow skyrocket to the point where it's a significant problem. I just don't see that being the case, especially when the best examples you seem to be able to come up with are ones like this one. Frankly, if there's a real problem that oversight somehow hampers our ability to stop terrorists, then we need to modify the process. I'm far from convinced that the only solution is to drop it entirely.
By some definition, all laws are a form of oppression. That's why we talk about them and decide which ones to enact. The level of surveillance they're asking for will enable oppression well beyond the "I can't dump my garbage into the drinking water supply" type of oppression you seem to be concerned with. Yes, I want the government to fine and imprison people who disobey all sorts of laws. Being uncomfortable with giving semi-competent and often unethical leaders broad reaching powers isn't the same as advocating anarchy. You're just playing games now.
You still seem to prefer your freedom to pollute over your right to privacy. I'm not sure what brings you to that interesting choice of priorities, but I'll leave you to it.
You seem to be denying that the results of any policy decision so subtle as pollution regulation or national speed limit could never be estimated by statistical means. I can only assume that you're not an actuary or an economist or somebody who otherwise deals with trends in data. Let me assure you that elderly people who die of respiratory problems correlated to the air that they breathe have very real corpses. Their deaths are just more commonplace and less spectacular, so our primitive herd sense for danger doesn't kick in to start the stampede.
Code Pink's behavior at the recent hearings was shameful, but I really don't feel much connection with them just because I happen to think that they're right on a few topics. I'm sure I like some of the same foods as they do as well. We also probably agree that the sky is blue. I'll resist the urge to point out some of the creepier extremist fringes with whom you might share policy opinions.
What, specifically, was the best example? I didn't listen to the entire set of hearings, but I also didn't hear anything that convinced me that FISA was hopelessly broken and we'd be better off winging it.
What would such "first-hand" testimony sound like? Examples of times when nothing went wrong, I suppose? More to the point, I would think that the burden of proof should be on the shoulders of the people who want to expand their power over the average citizen. I'm hardly a paranoid secessionist, but I certainly don't think that expanded police powers should be assumed necessary and safe unless shown to be otherwise.
I don't know.
I'm sorry, but your illustration is less of a reasoned illustration of a meaningful practical difference and more of an appeal to the emotions one feels as a result. Given the choice between a 10% chance of being hit by a car and killed and a 1% chance of being shot by a sniper, I'll choose the 1% chance any day. Nature gave us fear as animals to allow us to avoid scary and dangerous situations, but it's high time we started to use reason to avoid danger, because on large scales, it does a much better job. To make your example work, let's say that neighbor A is just as likely to hit more people and injure them as neighbor B is to attack future victims. In that case, they're both equally problematic and it is equally important that they're both stopped. The difference is that neighbor B is also morally culpable and should be punished. Likewise, the solutions for the two neighbors are different: one should be jailed and the other should have his driver's license revoked. There is no difference in the threat that they present. One might be more afraid of being badly beaten (I'm assuming that your analogy assumes that they're equally painful and caused equal damage), but that fear doesn't reflect reality--policy should. What you claim is a mistake is actually rational decision making based on probabilities and payouts.
People are notoriously bad at assessing risk. I remember an example thought experiment: Let's say it takes an average of 100,000 cigarettes to kill the average person. They're perfectly legal and a lot of people use them. If cigarettes were perfectly safe but 1 in every 100,000 exploded and blew your head off, there'd be congressional hearings, they'd be yanked off the shelves, and nobody would buy them. A spectacular death is scary, but an equally (or more) probable mundane death is ignored.
I'd be very interested in seeing some examples. The very low number of rejected warrants implies that either they're very likely to be granted or the people requesting them have nearly psychic powers when it comes to knowing what will cause them to be rejected (or they're simply very conservative about asking for them). Either of the latter would surprise me quite a bit. Specifically what did the courts require that they weren't able to provide? That seems to be a crucial policy point and I haven't found any real information to back up the claim. Given our government's track record when it comes to locking up the wrong people, I'm more inclined to believe that they're doing a bad job of gathering evidence over the claim that the bar is unjustifiably high.
Simply put, the lack of specifics. When requests for far-reaching power are accompanied by vague, hand-waving justifications, my ears perk up. If I'm going to grant the executive the potential power to spy on his political enemies, dissenters, and whistle blowers, I'd like to know that there's a good reason for him not to have anybody looking over his shoulder while he does it. Governments in general and our government specifically don't exactly have a strong record of using power responsibly when nobody is looking.
I don't think I'm really assuming the worst case. I'm assuming a very likely case. Just off the top of my head, COINTELPRO started as an all-American program to stop the communists and quickly devolved into a program that included subverting the civil rights movement because it as all operating behind closed doors. One could argue that they meant well in the process, but that's an even more frightening prospect--what if they hadn't? I don't see any reason to believe that our executive branch has suddenly and permanently become benevolent philosopher-kings when in the past, they've been flawed human beings like the rest of us. I'm also not inclined to believe that the incidents we've seen of the executive branch abusing surveillance are the worst ones we're ever going see.
It's interesting that you should say that given that you have called some of the arguments against warrantless wiretapping abstract and academic. If we ran our government on how the fringe worst-case scenario made us feel emotionally, we'd be in a world of hurt. You can't make policy decisions based on the 0.1% bad case unless that case is absolutely catastrophic. The probability of the average American being killed by a terrorist is infinitesimal. The idea that we should base serious decisions on it is not any better basis for government than making decisions based on all sorts of skewed alarmist beliefs about bad things that could happen. We take minor risks every day for perceive
If nobody gave me any clues as to when this was written, I could very easily be convinced that it was written about the internment of the Japanese. The people in charge back then were no different than the people in charge now: hardworking Americans with families and the security of their country at heart. Unfortunately, as you point out, war is a dirty business and fear can cause those people to make extraordinarily poor decisions.
Well, for starters, Donald Vance "disappeared" for two weeks--long enough for his fiancee to contact her congressperson. Even after he was able to contact her, he was denied trial and representation for another 80+ days. I don't see any particular reason to think that his case is the worst that could possibly happen, given that the government is essentially claiming that they didn't have to let him go at all. Ever.
This made me pause. I don't know about your lifestyle, but I have a job, a wife, and a ~75 year life expectancy. If you kidnapped me in the middle of the night and swept me off to a hotel where I was massaged daily and fed foie gras but I could never get in touch with my family or leave the facility, I'd strongly consider murdering you and trying to escape after a few years. In fact, I probably wouldn't even feel bad about it. Being held incommunicado and without charge for years at a time under the best conditions isn't even a distant cousin of being treated quite well. If you haven't heard it, I strongly recommend listening to the This American Life program on the topic. It's an hour long, but it's free and it's really worth thinking about. Yes, there are bad people at Guantanamo. But our government's judgment about who to scoop up and what to do with them isn't nearly as good as you seem to think it is.
There are a couple of problems with that. First, it's not clear to me that the press has always done a good job or is capable of doing that job under all circumstances. There's a difference between having a law that requires that information be turned over to an arbiter and having the arbiter legally locked out but given incentive to sleuth out the truth. What goes on in Guantanamo, specifically? The press doesn't know for sure. Who, specifically, was wiretapped and why? The press doesn't really know. In fact, even if they did, people would dismiss them because they're not really on the inside, so how can they be sure? Further, the press shouldn't necessarily know those things. Given the choice between having a judge take a look and give it the nod quietly and having to wait for the New York Times to plaster potentially sensitive information all over the front page, I'd choose the former.
Second, the oversight of the press is only good enough if the people in charge actually change their behavior when exposed. It appears to be getting harder and harder to shame our leaders into doing the right thing even after they're caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
We can come up with all the thought experiments we want. I've seen people try to come up with examples of terrorist plots that require tapping entire cities for months at a time. The simple answer is that some of those fringe cases can't be solved in the context of a free society. In those cases, we have a simple choice: Accept the possibility of being killed by a terrorist (probably comparable to being eaten by bears) or hand the government a power that it's practically guaranteed to start abusing. Terrorist carnage is a fringe case. Governments taking the powers given to them and using those powers to amass more power and squelch dissent is the norm. We need to factor that into the equations.
My complaint (and, I think, the complaint that many other people have) is not that they insist on being able to eavesdrop on phone calls for intelligence gathering purposes, but the fact that they insist on having that power without any oversight. I'm all for giving law enforcement and intelligence agencies all the tools they need to do their jobs well provided there's adequate neutral oversight to prevent them from abusing those tools. When they insist that they need the tools but they don't want the oversight, and then they can't come up with a convincing reason not to have the oversight, a lot of us start questioning their motives. A guy trying to buy a truckload of dynamite should make you nervous. A guy who steadfastly refuses to show ID for the purpose should set off alarm bells.
History has shown us that when we stop requiring that people justify their exercises of power, they'll start using those powers in unjustifiable ways--even people who would otherwise have been honest folks with our best interests at heart under normal circumstances. As they say, locks keep honest people honest. So does accountability. I'd much rather see a system that's designed in such a way that those nice people are never tempted to become bad people. That way, everybody gets their job done and we can all remain friends.