This may be a sign that the current efforts at quantum computers are finally paying off. And he wants everyone to trust encryption that is breakable by anyone with a big enough budget.
There's reasonable evidence, though not proof as far as I know, that Microsoft was bankrolling at least part of the case. You'd probably need to read back through Groklaw to find the reports of it though.
AND to a corrupt legal system that doesn't rate justice very highly in it's decisions. The case should properly have ended early in January of the second year.
I believe that most of the bankers are citizens, so for them to influence government is hardly an occupation. I've got a lot of problems with the *WAY* and the *EXTENT* to which they are able to influence the government, but not with their being able to at all.
It's reasonable to say that the US got hacked, but it pretty much did it to itself with the way it incorporated Nazi secret police into the NSA/CIA. (I don't believe either actually existed at the time, but the agencies that they were incorporated into became those agencies. I'm not sure of the genesis of the NSA, but the CIA originated from the OSS.) This is similar to the way that Nazi rocket scientists were conscripted into the corresponding US military program, but the rocket scientists weren't political ideologues. (Ideologue isn't right, but neither is missionary, which would be my second choice of word. And I need something more specific than sociopath.)
That's not actually true. You *CAN* do both, but you need to ration your resources to both. If you were to do it just right you could probably get a synergetic mix.
Unfortunately, giving either side all it wants is a recipe for failure, and if either side can grab the levers of power, then it won't show reasonable restraint. As you noted.
What you don't understand is who they are supposed to protect and serve. The police exist to protect and serve the state. All other matters are optional. And it is my belief that I'm not being hyperbolic here, but that this is a precise statement of their legal purpose.
In a well run civilization they protect and serve the state by causing the citizens to trust that the state has their welfare in mind and by maintaining order. But their purpose is to protect the state.
Well, the real problem is thinking of it as a unified group. But if you consider them as if they were a unified group a case can be made from many different points of view that they have done negatively useful things more often than useful things.
"For once" seems stupid hyperbole, but understandable. Though still stupid...or possibly bigoted. (Without more information one can't tell why they said that.)
That seems reasonable, or at least consistent with the laws of the last few decades.
I'm not sure I actually agree with that stance, but I'm rather sure that unless the general principle is overthrown that it's bad to allow some groups to censor communications without repercussions and not allow others. Now to what extent any groups should be so allowed...
The standard that if you control what is being communicated, then you are responsible for it and if you don't you aren't is at least intelligible.
It doesn't really matter whether it's intentional of algorithmic, what matters is the effect. It would only matter whether it's intentional of algorithmic if you were in a position to fix one or the other.
Now the real question is whether this will affect the popularity of twitter, but there've been so many other stories about bad actions by twitter that I expect it to be impossible to figure out which had what effect.
While I tend to agree with the general tone of your note, it doesn't seem to apply to this case. In this case it looks as if the management is doing what they can to solve the problem rather than hiding it.
That said, there needs to be a better way to handle radioactive waste. LOTS better if we're going to build any more nuclear power plants. I still don't understand why it isn't vitrified, sealed, and used as a source of process heat. Vitrifying would be expensive, but it's hard to believe that it would be expensive compared to mounting guard over it for multiple decades with NO positive payoff. (It would probably still leak radon or tritium or some such, but only very slowly, so seal it in a metal case with a paraffin inner liner and if needed a valve that allows occasional tapping for pressure release. And use it as a heat source. If you do this right you could open the case after a couple of decades (how many?), grind the vitrified material into sand (unless you could arrange that it be initially sand sized nodules), mix it with tar and use it as an automatic road defroster underlayer. Sand sized is about right to keep the nodes from blowing around, embedding them in tar keeps water away from them, and their heat keeps the tar soft. And keeping snow off the roads is useful. (Plus nobody lives on them.) Tar is a good absorber of neutrons, alpha and beta particles don't penetrate well. Using it as an underlayer means that it doesn't even wear away mixed with rubber. And you've already gotten most of the energy out of it earlier when you were using it as a source of process heat.
Put a good system of handling radioactive waste into place and half my objections to nuclear plants would go away. (The other half has to do with management styles/incentives that encourage ignoring/hiding problems...which didn't happen here.)
I tend to think of tritium as pretty benign. IIRC it has a half-life of 12 years, so it's a pretty high level radiation while it exists, and it DOES tend to end up in organic molecules, but it also doesn't accumulate easily. But a radiation leak they can't control (well, haven't controlled) is worrying.
The problem with tritium is that it's an easily bio-available molecule. It can easily end up attached to your DNA, and when it decays it's likely to damage that molecule with unpredictable effects. (Usually nothing, but occasionally cancer, and extremely rarely it might yield an inherited change.) Except at really high levels the problem is almost only the molecule that it's a part of when it decays. That molecule WILL be damaged, possibly irreparably, and it MIGHT be important.
The problem with a small leak is that it's likely to get worse. It sounds like they are working on fixing the problem, but working in highly radioactive areas is quite difficult. So this is a problem worth worrying about (but not worth obsessing about).
Well, the summary didn't give any time frame, but I tend to find an 80% increase worrying. Presumably it is currently far below dangerous levels, but radiation doesn't naturally increase by many mechanisms, so the most likely source would be a leak at the nuclear plant, and there are several reports of nuclear plants that are being allowed to operate not only far beyond their design life, but at higher pressures than their designers intended. Since this one is located upstream of NYC it would appear to be one of the ones built during the first flush of optimism, where designers hadn't gotten properly cautious. (Later and the site would probably have been more carefully chosen.) As such it's probably one of the plants already being operated beyond its design life. And that such a plant should start leaking *IS* worrying, even if the current leak is small enough to be safe. The internals of the older plants can be quite difficult to properly maintain, and high levels of radiation can cause unexpected weakening in structural materials.
So this is something that needs to be addressed. "Uncontrollable" is almost certainly hyperbole, but "no attempt is being made to control" is quite plausible. Any attempt would be likely to be expensive, and plant operators are understandably reluctant to spend money until it's been proven to be necessary. Unfortunately this is similar to not looking at your logs so you won't see that you need to rewrite your firewall rules. This should be taken as an early warning sign, but odds are it will be ignored to the extent feasible.
Then there's the question of the reliability of the source. Many have called that into question, and from the looks it seems written to inflame hysteria. This is rarely helpful, and it likely to cause the reported problem to be ignored by those who should pay attention because they don't want to further inflame an existing hysteria. One can hope that it only causes them to avoid public action, but since there's already a desire to not notice a problem that needs fixing...
As may well be noticed I don't trust the management of nuclear power plants to not hide problems that exist. There have been several cases where there were problems at plants that were caused by short-sighted management. There are also technical problems, like no place to store the radioactive waste. I consider the entire industry to have been implemented in a slip-shod way. Not the design of the plants (except the early ones), but in the management incentives.
If only he hadn't tied himself to the Viet Nam conflict. When Kennedy died we had, IIRC, 52 military advisors on the ground. And that whole imbroglio yielded NO promise of national advantage that I've ever been able to detect. The way it worked out there was certainly no advantage.... Unless you count the ending of the draft, which allowed the govt a relatively free hand with how it used military force. *I* count that as a negative, but I can see why some might think it a bonus.
There's reasonable evidence that we've already "jumped the shark". This is something that can only be really determined a century or so later, but there are reasonable lines of evidence leading to that conclusion. The reason we can't tell for sure is probably that the next "leading nation" still hasn't gotten it's ducks in a row. China is a big contender, but it's not the only possibility.
OTOH, it is usually possible to recover from a stumble if you make correct moves, but Hillary? Trump? Of the major candidates only Sanders seems to even have a glimmer of understanding of the problems that are approaching, and I'm not to sure about him. And if he did get in, what could he get through a blindly obstructive congress? (Well, at least the Senate, we don't know what the House will look like after the next election cycle.) Please note, I'm not talking strictly about parties here. Only a very few of the current Senate appear to have even a desire to work for the good of the country (defining that roughly on the state of the median citizen... and using a different median citizen for each dimension of measure of state. Nobody's average in all dimensions. If you want you could also count the mean and the mode, but I think that just makes the figuring harder without basically changing the result. OTOH, just figuring on the mode yields unpleasant results.)
I do agree, but I also think that it's a mistake to reach too far. Not that NASA is actually approaching that.
If we weren't wasting money on new models of fighter that are worse than the last model, etc. and the money went instead to NASA, then a lot more could reasonably be done. But it's also true that given the US political environment no long term government funded plan has any security unless it's pushed by either a large majority of the people or by a strong special interest. An election cycle or two and the support will just vanish.
Because of this I'm all in favor of short term research, and low cost research that is unobtrusive enough to not be noticed. Improved ion-jet rockets is a thing that should be worked on. Also solar power satellites for beam-casting power to distant missions (say beyond Jupiter) as a replacement of the Plutonium that is being used up. Note that the beam-casting power could also have lots of more local uses, so once a modest version had proved itself it could be upgraded. Small incremental steps are slow, but they'll get us there eventually if someone doesn't beat us to the goalpost. And it's my opinion that space habitats are more reasonable than a Mars base. Very few people would accept that, however, so the only way to do it is slow small steps. And a good first step would be to construct actual closed ecosystems. (Get the necessary inputs and outputs to a bare minimum. You've GOT to allow energy input and heat output, e.g., but try for a real sealed environment.) Hell, start with closed environment mouse colonies. That should be fairly cheap. Then slowly work up to more complex ecosystems. BioSphere was an example of NOT being unobtrusive. The things I'm talking about would only publish in academic and engineering journals...not that they would hide from reporters, they just wouldn't court them.
N.B.: The kind of progress I'm talking about is going on right now. I don't always agree with the directions it's taking, but it's happening. I presume, without knowing, that the Vasimir ion rocket is being worked on and improved. It's main real drawback is a need for electric power. A really advanced ion rocket, though, would be able to work off of finely ground rock dust. But that would clearly take more power than pre-refined fuels.
It's not just the composition of our own solar system, it's also the improbable orbital gymnastics required for the Earth to end up with an orbiting moon with about 1/8th of its mass (well 0.012300 times as much). How important is that? I don't think anybody knows. But the capture event itself did a lot of rearranging of the material distribution leading to the Pacific Ocean and an unreasonably heavy crust.
Not necessarily. There are plausible arguments that without the moon life could not have evolved on Earth. The collision between the proto-Earth and the proto-Moon did a lot more than just set the tides running. It added a tremendous amount of heat to the magma, probably created the Pacific ocean basin, etc. And it acts to stabilize the gyroscopic tilt of the Earth.
That said, I think he's underestimating the size of the universe, and many of the effects of the moon could be approximated by being in orbit around a Jovian or super-Jovian planet. (Jupiter's a bit too far away from the sun for this to work in the solar system, because you don't want a close orbit to the larger planet, but rather a fairly distant one, where the magnetic fields won't be so strong. But this, again, is based around trying to create a close match to Earth. Life may well be adaptive enough not to need this.
So all-in-all I rate the chances of a close alien intelligence pretty small unless it's an evolved Tippler robot, but nowhere near a small as he does. Of course, I'm not an astronomer.
When you are attacking a belief held by people in present time, it doesn't make much sense to base your attack on what people thought it meant several translations ago. The fraction of modern people who base their belief on that will be minuscule.
So if you want to claim that the Bible was once much more reasonable, when interpreted as the way that those who originally wrote it intended, this may be true but is largely irrelevant. It can only effectively be disputed by those who want to learn a series of ancient languages and trace the translations and their possible idiomatic meanings. If you don't already believe, this requirement is totally unreasonable. Even among the believers almost none will do this, even when their faith clearly instructs them to do so. What proportion of Afgan Muslims can read the original Arabic of the Koran...which isn't modern Arabic. The Bible is worse. Parts of it were (probably) originally written in Babylonian, parts (probably) in Egyptian. The modern Hebrew script is itself relatively recent, and as you go back the very separations between the letters changes. (Well, it's nowhere near as recent as our script, which is essentially Roman, but with a few changes in the letters.)
The problem with that is that what they are irrationally loyal to is their own idea of such a creator, and being exposed to the actual entity would be likely to destroy that loyalty.
You can lie about anything. Claiming that it is a statistic doesn't make it anything other than another lie.
It's also true that statistics are easy to misuse, but the problem isn't (usually) lies, it's usually people not understanding what they are doing...or at least so I believe.
Statistics was invented to solve practical problems, specifically to win gambling games without cheating. It works. (And the original games it was developed for have for some reason become unpopular, or had their rules changed.) This doesn't mean you can't use it inappropriately, i.e. in places where it doesn't work, but the same is true of the inverse square law.
Classical Game Theory dealt with artificially simplified situations in order to make the calculations tractable. Computers have significantly improved this. Compare Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma vs. Prisoner's Dilemma.
For something simple on this that's several decades old read the appendix to Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene". As you start dealing with more complex models the answers get more reasonable...and easier to actually see reflected in the "real world".
That said, often times the only winning strategy *IS* to be the biggest possible prick. But that can come with tremendous costs compared to a large number of successful but not winning strategies. E.g., only one biggest prick can win, but lots of secondary positions can win. So the question becomes "What's the cost of not winning when trying for biggest prick?" Unfortunately, in politics it seems to often be the second best position. And Game Theory correctly predicts that this will lead to a large number of contestants trying for biggest prick.
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This may be a sign that the current efforts at quantum computers are finally paying off. And he wants everyone to trust encryption that is breakable by anyone with a big enough budget.
There's reasonable evidence, though not proof as far as I know, that Microsoft was bankrolling at least part of the case. You'd probably need to read back through Groklaw to find the reports of it though.
AND to a corrupt legal system that doesn't rate justice very highly in it's decisions. The case should properly have ended early in January of the second year.
I believe that most of the bankers are citizens, so for them to influence government is hardly an occupation. I've got a lot of problems with the *WAY* and the *EXTENT* to which they are able to influence the government, but not with their being able to at all.
It's reasonable to say that the US got hacked, but it pretty much did it to itself with the way it incorporated Nazi secret police into the NSA/CIA. (I don't believe either actually existed at the time, but the agencies that they were incorporated into became those agencies. I'm not sure of the genesis of the NSA, but the CIA originated from the OSS.) This is similar to the way that Nazi rocket scientists were conscripted into the corresponding US military program, but the rocket scientists weren't political ideologues. (Ideologue isn't right, but neither is missionary, which would be my second choice of word. And I need something more specific than sociopath.)
That's not actually true. You *CAN* do both, but you need to ration your resources to both. If you were to do it just right you could probably get a synergetic mix.
Unfortunately, giving either side all it wants is a recipe for failure, and if either side can grab the levers of power, then it won't show reasonable restraint. As you noted.
What you don't understand is who they are supposed to protect and serve. The police exist to protect and serve the state. All other matters are optional. And it is my belief that I'm not being hyperbolic here, but that this is a precise statement of their legal purpose.
In a well run civilization they protect and serve the state by causing the citizens to trust that the state has their welfare in mind and by maintaining order. But their purpose is to protect the state.
Well, the real problem is thinking of it as a unified group. But if you consider them as if they were a unified group a case can be made from many different points of view that they have done negatively useful things more often than useful things.
"For once" seems stupid hyperbole, but understandable. Though still stupid...or possibly bigoted. (Without more information one can't tell why they said that.)
You are responding as if you believe the police are being tried by an unbiased court. There is much evidence that cases doubt upon that assumption.
They're supposed to be paid well so that they aren't easy to bribe. Somehow that plan doesn't seem to have worked out well.
Well, he certainly owns a couple of Senators that I could name. Probably others, but I only really pay attention to the ones I might vote for.
That seems reasonable, or at least consistent with the laws of the last few decades.
I'm not sure I actually agree with that stance, but I'm rather sure that unless the general principle is overthrown that it's bad to allow some groups to censor communications without repercussions and not allow others. Now to what extent any groups should be so allowed...
The standard that if you control what is being communicated, then you are responsible for it and if you don't you aren't is at least intelligible.
As someone who never uses twitter...
It doesn't really matter whether it's intentional of algorithmic, what matters is the effect. It would only matter whether it's intentional of algorithmic if you were in a position to fix one or the other.
Now the real question is whether this will affect the popularity of twitter, but there've been so many other stories about bad actions by twitter that I expect it to be impossible to figure out which had what effect.
While I tend to agree with the general tone of your note, it doesn't seem to apply to this case. In this case it looks as if the management is doing what they can to solve the problem rather than hiding it.
That said, there needs to be a better way to handle radioactive waste. LOTS better if we're going to build any more nuclear power plants. I still don't understand why it isn't vitrified, sealed, and used as a source of process heat. Vitrifying would be expensive, but it's hard to believe that it would be expensive compared to mounting guard over it for multiple decades with NO positive payoff. (It would probably still leak radon or tritium or some such, but only very slowly, so seal it in a metal case with a paraffin inner liner and if needed a valve that allows occasional tapping for pressure release. And use it as a heat source. If you do this right you could open the case after a couple of decades (how many?), grind the vitrified material into sand (unless you could arrange that it be initially sand sized nodules), mix it with tar and use it as an automatic road defroster underlayer. Sand sized is about right to keep the nodes from blowing around, embedding them in tar keeps water away from them, and their heat keeps the tar soft. And keeping snow off the roads is useful. (Plus nobody lives on them.) Tar is a good absorber of neutrons, alpha and beta particles don't penetrate well. Using it as an underlayer means that it doesn't even wear away mixed with rubber. And you've already gotten most of the energy out of it earlier when you were using it as a source of process heat.
Put a good system of handling radioactive waste into place and half my objections to nuclear plants would go away. (The other half has to do with management styles/incentives that encourage ignoring/hiding problems...which didn't happen here.)
Thank you. One of the big things in you notice was "self reported". That implies they are doing things correctly.
But there needs to be a better way to handle radioactive waste.
I tend to think of tritium as pretty benign. IIRC it has a half-life of 12 years, so it's a pretty high level radiation while it exists, and it DOES tend to end up in organic molecules, but it also doesn't accumulate easily. But a radiation leak they can't control (well, haven't controlled) is worrying.
The problem with tritium is that it's an easily bio-available molecule. It can easily end up attached to your DNA, and when it decays it's likely to damage that molecule with unpredictable effects. (Usually nothing, but occasionally cancer, and extremely rarely it might yield an inherited change.) Except at really high levels the problem is almost only the molecule that it's a part of when it decays. That molecule WILL be damaged, possibly irreparably, and it MIGHT be important.
The problem with a small leak is that it's likely to get worse. It sounds like they are working on fixing the problem, but working in highly radioactive areas is quite difficult. So this is a problem worth worrying about (but not worth obsessing about).
Well, the summary didn't give any time frame, but I tend to find an 80% increase worrying. Presumably it is currently far below dangerous levels, but radiation doesn't naturally increase by many mechanisms, so the most likely source would be a leak at the nuclear plant, and there are several reports of nuclear plants that are being allowed to operate not only far beyond their design life, but at higher pressures than their designers intended. Since this one is located upstream of NYC it would appear to be one of the ones built during the first flush of optimism, where designers hadn't gotten properly cautious. (Later and the site would probably have been more carefully chosen.) As such it's probably one of the plants already being operated beyond its design life. And that such a plant should start leaking *IS* worrying, even if the current leak is small enough to be safe. The internals of the older plants can be quite difficult to properly maintain, and high levels of radiation can cause unexpected weakening in structural materials.
So this is something that needs to be addressed. "Uncontrollable" is almost certainly hyperbole, but "no attempt is being made to control" is quite plausible. Any attempt would be likely to be expensive, and plant operators are understandably reluctant to spend money until it's been proven to be necessary. Unfortunately this is similar to not looking at your logs so you won't see that you need to rewrite your firewall rules. This should be taken as an early warning sign, but odds are it will be ignored to the extent feasible.
Then there's the question of the reliability of the source. Many have called that into question, and from the looks it seems written to inflame hysteria. This is rarely helpful, and it likely to cause the reported problem to be ignored by those who should pay attention because they don't want to further inflame an existing hysteria. One can hope that it only causes them to avoid public action, but since there's already a desire to not notice a problem that needs fixing ...
As may well be noticed I don't trust the management of nuclear power plants to not hide problems that exist. There have been several cases where there were problems at plants that were caused by short-sighted management. There are also technical problems, like no place to store the radioactive waste. I consider the entire industry to have been implemented in a slip-shod way. Not the design of the plants (except the early ones), but in the management incentives.
If only he hadn't tied himself to the Viet Nam conflict. When Kennedy died we had, IIRC, 52 military advisors on the ground. And that whole imbroglio yielded NO promise of national advantage that I've ever been able to detect. The way it worked out there was certainly no advantage. ... Unless you count the ending of the draft, which allowed the govt a relatively free hand with how it used military force. *I* count that as a negative, but I can see why some might think it a bonus.
There's reasonable evidence that we've already "jumped the shark". This is something that can only be really determined a century or so later, but there are reasonable lines of evidence leading to that conclusion. The reason we can't tell for sure is probably that the next "leading nation" still hasn't gotten it's ducks in a row. China is a big contender, but it's not the only possibility.
OTOH, it is usually possible to recover from a stumble if you make correct moves, but Hillary? Trump? Of the major candidates only Sanders seems to even have a glimmer of understanding of the problems that are approaching, and I'm not to sure about him. And if he did get in, what could he get through a blindly obstructive congress? (Well, at least the Senate, we don't know what the House will look like after the next election cycle.) Please note, I'm not talking strictly about parties here. Only a very few of the current Senate appear to have even a desire to work for the good of the country (defining that roughly on the state of the median citizen ... and using a different median citizen for each dimension of measure of state. Nobody's average in all dimensions. If you want you could also count the mean and the mode, but I think that just makes the figuring harder without basically changing the result. OTOH, just figuring on the mode yields unpleasant results.)
I do agree, but I also think that it's a mistake to reach too far. Not that NASA is actually approaching that.
If we weren't wasting money on new models of fighter that are worse than the last model, etc. and the money went instead to NASA, then a lot more could reasonably be done. But it's also true that given the US political environment no long term government funded plan has any security unless it's pushed by either a large majority of the people or by a strong special interest. An election cycle or two and the support will just vanish.
Because of this I'm all in favor of short term research, and low cost research that is unobtrusive enough to not be noticed. Improved ion-jet rockets is a thing that should be worked on. Also solar power satellites for beam-casting power to distant missions (say beyond Jupiter) as a replacement of the Plutonium that is being used up. Note that the beam-casting power could also have lots of more local uses, so once a modest version had proved itself it could be upgraded. Small incremental steps are slow, but they'll get us there eventually if someone doesn't beat us to the goalpost. And it's my opinion that space habitats are more reasonable than a Mars base. Very few people would accept that, however, so the only way to do it is slow small steps. And a good first step would be to construct actual closed ecosystems. (Get the necessary inputs and outputs to a bare minimum. You've GOT to allow energy input and heat output, e.g., but try for a real sealed environment.) Hell, start with closed environment mouse colonies. That should be fairly cheap. Then slowly work up to more complex ecosystems. BioSphere was an example of NOT being unobtrusive. The things I'm talking about would only publish in academic and engineering journals...not that they would hide from reporters, they just wouldn't court them.
N.B.: The kind of progress I'm talking about is going on right now. I don't always agree with the directions it's taking, but it's happening. I presume, without knowing, that the Vasimir ion rocket is being worked on and improved. It's main real drawback is a need for electric power. A really advanced ion rocket, though, would be able to work off of finely ground rock dust. But that would clearly take more power than pre-refined fuels.
It's not just the composition of our own solar system, it's also the improbable orbital gymnastics required for the Earth to end up with an orbiting moon with about 1/8th of its mass (well 0.012300 times as much). How important is that? I don't think anybody knows. But the capture event itself did a lot of rearranging of the material distribution leading to the Pacific Ocean and an unreasonably heavy crust.
Not necessarily. There are plausible arguments that without the moon life could not have evolved on Earth. The collision between the proto-Earth and the proto-Moon did a lot more than just set the tides running. It added a tremendous amount of heat to the magma, probably created the Pacific ocean basin, etc. And it acts to stabilize the gyroscopic tilt of the Earth.
That said, I think he's underestimating the size of the universe, and many of the effects of the moon could be approximated by being in orbit around a Jovian or super-Jovian planet. (Jupiter's a bit too far away from the sun for this to work in the solar system, because you don't want a close orbit to the larger planet, but rather a fairly distant one, where the magnetic fields won't be so strong. But this, again, is based around trying to create a close match to Earth. Life may well be adaptive enough not to need this.
So all-in-all I rate the chances of a close alien intelligence pretty small unless it's an evolved Tippler robot, but nowhere near a small as he does. Of course, I'm not an astronomer.
When you are attacking a belief held by people in present time, it doesn't make much sense to base your attack on what people thought it meant several translations ago. The fraction of modern people who base their belief on that will be minuscule.
So if you want to claim that the Bible was once much more reasonable, when interpreted as the way that those who originally wrote it intended, this may be true but is largely irrelevant. It can only effectively be disputed by those who want to learn a series of ancient languages and trace the translations and their possible idiomatic meanings. If you don't already believe, this requirement is totally unreasonable. Even among the believers almost none will do this, even when their faith clearly instructs them to do so. What proportion of Afgan Muslims can read the original Arabic of the Koran...which isn't modern Arabic. The Bible is worse. Parts of it were (probably) originally written in Babylonian, parts (probably) in Egyptian. The modern Hebrew script is itself relatively recent, and as you go back the very separations between the letters changes. (Well, it's nowhere near as recent as our script, which is essentially Roman, but with a few changes in the letters.)
The problem with that is that what they are irrationally loyal to is their own idea of such a creator, and being exposed to the actual entity would be likely to destroy that loyalty.
You can lie about anything. Claiming that it is a statistic doesn't make it anything other than another lie.
It's also true that statistics are easy to misuse, but the problem isn't (usually) lies, it's usually people not understanding what they are doing...or at least so I believe.
Statistics was invented to solve practical problems, specifically to win gambling games without cheating. It works. (And the original games it was developed for have for some reason become unpopular, or had their rules changed.) This doesn't mean you can't use it inappropriately, i.e. in places where it doesn't work, but the same is true of the inverse square law.
Classical Game Theory dealt with artificially simplified situations in order to make the calculations tractable. Computers have significantly improved this. Compare Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma vs. Prisoner's Dilemma.
For something simple on this that's several decades old read the appendix to Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene". As you start dealing with more complex models the answers get more reasonable...and easier to actually see reflected in the "real world".
That said, often times the only winning strategy *IS* to be the biggest possible prick. But that can come with tremendous costs compared to a large number of successful but not winning strategies. E.g., only one biggest prick can win, but lots of secondary positions can win. So the question becomes "What's the cost of not winning when trying for biggest prick?" Unfortunately, in politics it seems to often be the second best position. And Game Theory correctly predicts that this will lead to a large number of contestants trying for biggest prick.