You do realize that the people working on Ubiquity and the people working on something like the right-click issues you mention are different people with disjoint sets of skills, right?
There are always plenty of thing that need to be fixed. Should those have been worked on before performance improvements? Before support for new web standards? Before other things that need to be fixed?
Did you actually read through those bugs? What fraction are actually reproducible? What fraction are caused by the Flash plug-in?
Seriously, it's easy to say "just fix all the bugs", but in practice one ends up having to make tradeoffs in what one fixes and implementing new features to address changing user needs, to improve the user experience, and to stay relevant in the market (e.g. IE is implementing all sorts of web standards features all of a sudden; Gecko and webkit are implementing SMIL).
If you think something like ubiquity is "bloat" or distracts from work on other things, you should really take a hard look at SMIL. And unlike ubiquity, SMIL directly competes for core engine developer time.
Those aren't crash bugs (which are what he was talking about), but cpu-hogging bugs (as you say).
That's quite a different thing, especially if the browser remains responsive during the period of high CPU usage. I'll note that you excluded the bugs where it doesn't ("hang" bugs), which are generally considered to matter more and hence get priority when being worked on.
If your point is that performance bugs in general should be worked on, sure. They are.
Which bugs are we talking about here? I can probably give you a pretty good idea of whether the 3.1 betas fix them, if you don't want to test yourself.
I'd also appreciate a pointer to where Mozilla was promising specific fixes, actually.
You've been submitting the crash reports, right? Can you look at your about:crashes and point me to the relevant URIs? I'd love to see what I can do to get those issues fixed.
> they're not going to pay more than they can afford if they don't think they're going to > get an acceptable amount of value for their payment
This doesn't seem to be empirically true.
> all make bad business decisions and hire over-valued, over-priced CEOs, then they'll > pay the consequence of going out of business.
This is certainly empirically false for the financial industry, since they're being propped up so they won't go out of business.
Similar for the auto industry, to a lesser extent.
> My point is that successful companies cannot engage in a senseless "relentless wage > spiral" for CEO compensation, and still remain in business.
As long as the government stays out of it, sure. But that's not happening.
> Look - if companies pay too much for chief executives because they're corrupt, or their > board is somehow unduly influenced to overpay for leadership, they'll go out of > business because there are innumerable other, leaner, less-stupid companies just raring > to take their place as industry leaders. You can bank on that.
This assumes low enough barriers to entry and the ability of companies to actually fail. Both are false in a number of industries.
I have no problem with rational thought as long as you take into account all the facts.;)
I didn't say that's all compensation consultants do. It _is_ what they do in the case of CEOs, by and large, and by and large companies operate as I described in many industries. Of course there are whole industries, and even individual companies in industries such as banking, that will in fact limit what they're willing to pay CEOs. That leaves a relentless wage spiral at the top, as I said.
They didn't "sabotage" anything. They simply installed a system-wide extension. If it's not installed in the Firefox profile, Firefox can't very well remove it (especially if the user it's running as is not privileged).
Note that the "Disable" button works just fine, as it should. Had they really wanted to prevent this thing being disabled, they could have done that too, you know.
You could, but that would basically mean the system administrator can't make extensions available system-wide. A tradeoff, of course, and assumes that you trust your system administrator somewhat...
> If doctors were making insane amounts of money then more people would become doctors
That doesn't work, sadly. And the reason it doesn't work is that the AMA has a government-granted monopoly on deciding who can become a doctor. And they make sure that the supply is not too large. This is why medical school applications are on the rise without an increase in the number of graduates. This is also why doctors in hospitals end up with 80-hour workweeks. There's fundamentally a shortage of doctors in this country, and it's being perpetuated to keep up the incomes of the existing doctors (who are the ones who get to control how many new doctors there can be).
Lawyers are in a very similar situation, of course.
> Unless *every* single company is engaging in some sort of "CEO Salary collusion"
That's actually pretty much what's going on. CEO salaries are determined by CEO salary consultants, who base them on average CEO salaries plus a bit (to attract an above average CEO). The result is a relentless upward spiral of CEO salaries.
> So your defense of anti-intellectualism amounts to the observation > that deep knowledge requires specialization?
Excuse me? My defense of skepticism of authority, which is not the same thing, includes the observation that over-specialization means that you have to make very sure that the "expert" that you're listening to is an expert in the right thing. For the most part, such experts are fairly busy with their work, and the mouth-pieces are often not particularly expert.
> Some bad people have had good educations, and some good people have had terrible > educations. Education is not character.
Indeed, though it's often treated interchangeably in the US nowadays. For example, a college education is used for character traits including the ability to actually perform a job well, with the result that a college education is required for many positions where it's not actually needed. It's just used as a first-cut weed-out tool.
> That does not invalidate the notion that those with an education are in general more > competent in their chosen fields.
Agreed, but it also does not mean that all those within a given field are equally competent, nor does it mean that they are competent outside their chosen fields. I don't think anyone disputes the fact that Chomsky did excellent work in linguistics, say. It's his other endeavors people might not be convinced about.
> but you'd be a fool not to trust him in the area of his expertise
The problem is what to do when people with that area of expertise disagree or when there are significant biases in who is granted access to that area of expertise (e.g. refusing to publish certain classes of papers).
> Nobody is advocating putting rocket scientists in charge of mitigating climate change > or vica versa. That strawman is implied by your discussion of specialization.
We have no problems with putting lawyers in charge of mitigating climate change; in fact we're doing so quite actively. But more to the point, I don't think there are many people out there, if any, who have a firm grasp of the entirety of our state of knowledge wrt climate science. A number of people have a very good idea of what's going on in their nook of the whole enterprise, synthesis is hard.
Rocket science is an interesting mention, since there's no way I'd want to put someone whos expertise lies in fluid dynamics in charge of the avionics. He might do fine on the engine, though. For most people, there's no difference, though, and they'll happily elect or appoint a "rocket scientist" to do either job.
> What's really happening is conservatism rejects education as a qualification
No, what's really happening is that part of the modern Republican party base, which calls themselves "conservative" in about the same way that East Germany called itself "democratic", rejects education as a qualification. At the same time, part of the Democratic party base elevates education to a wholly-undeserved pedestal. Both tendencies are bad. Both are encouraged by the respective parties in the interest of garnering votes.
> allowed the right to hold power over the last 30 years.
Uh... You mean those years when we had a Democratic president for 8 years and had majority-democratic congresses at various points in time?
I agree that the last 8 years have not been a good thing, but I will posit that any time the same party holds all three of House, Senate, and White House it's a bad thing.
Call me cynical if you will, but for both of the political parties the priorities are keeping the top priorities are keeping the two-party system in place and staying in power. All other considerations are secondary. Staying in power is justified by saying that otherwise other goals cannot be achieved, but since those goals are routinely sacrificed to staying in power, they don't get achieved anyway.
> imagining otherwise is conservative propaganda designed to keep people > out of politics.
On the contrary, it's rational propaganda that should be getting people into politics in droves, and should be getting them to vote for third parties as much as the power structure allows (it's hard to do in Illinois, say, where there are structural impediments to even getting 3rd party candidates on the ballot). Unfortunately, most people seem to feel that this two-party thing we have going on is somehow good and like to cast things in terms of small contrasts between the two parties.
> The fact is that progressives do support a large, comfortable middle class
On the ground, yes. That's not what "progressive" politicians support, however, based on their voting records. For example, they routinely prefer what is usually called the upper-middle-class over what is usually called the lower-middle-class. This is pretty obvious if you look at the history of "free trade" agreements. Where's the free trade in medical services? Accounting? Legal services? There's trade in these ("medical tourism" as it's offhandedly labeled), but there are also government-granted certification monopolies that impose significant barriers on said trade.
> progressivism has always been about a quasiutilitarian idea of the greatest > happiness for the greatest number
No, as far as I can tell it's been about "equal" happiness for everyone (less so in the US than in other places, granted). That's not at all the same thing.
> Kipling's heart was in the right place. The problem was his notion that there is an > innate hierarchy of race, which is factually incorrect. However, educated societies are > clearly better than ignorant ones. They have less political turmoil, and their > inhabitants are happier and live longer.
The US has become much more educated, on average, in the last 50 years. While people do in fact live longer, there is, if anything, more political turmoil, and I'd question whether people are happier.
Even the rise in life expectancy is not necessarily caused by the rise in the the general level of education.
What you have here is a correlation of various things like political stability, increased life expectancy, and happiness with education (and not a very strong one for happiness). Let's not mistake that for causation. For example, political stability can well cause a more educated society, all else being equal, since the investment in education might make less sense in the face of political instabiity.
> Education isn't an innate characteristic like race; anyone can receive an education
That's true in a strict sense, but it's not true that anyone can receive any education. The latter interpretation is the one that people tend to use, and the resulting mess in the US with college education being diluted so as to make it possible for everyone to have a college degree, is one corllary...
> and it is certainly the responsibility of the educated to ensure that everyone has > access to education.
Fully agreed. That does not give them leeway to write off those who either will not or cannot take advantage of that access.
> There is nothing morally questionable about that notion.
There is something morally questionable about any elitism, no matter how well-motivated.
> Why are you bringing religion into this?
Because that's what the progressive movement is: a religion. It doesn't involve a father-figure God, but it has dogma, it has a priesthood, it has believers, it has fanatics, it has intolerance of heritics... the whole deal.
> Frankly, if you can't see the difference between the rigor of science and the dogma of > religion, why are you on a technology-oriented site?
_I_ can see the difference. Most people apparently can't, and many have simply transferred their faith and fanaticism from religion to science. This leads to the adoption of scientific dogma which is NOT a good thing for science. The effect is most pronounced in the sciences where controlled experiments are difficult to perform (e.g. the social sciences). Science is very difficult to do well even in the best of circumstances, and if there is significant pressure to publish only certain results, then those are the results that will be published. See http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22237 for a good description of what can happen to corrupt the scientific process when money and political influence are at stake, as they always are in the social sciences. Note in particular the identity of the author, and the paragraph containing "It is simply no longer possible to believe..."
> Science allows us to have the kind of lifestyle to which we are accustomed. > Religion has no produced a shred of tangible progress in our knowledge of > the world.
Yes, which is why I find it worrisome when science takes on more and more of the trappings of religion.
> There are overwhelming reasons to trust science in situations religion can't handle
There are overwhelming reasons to assume that science might be right and religion is probably wrong in many situations. That doesn't absolve one of responsibility for double-checking the science if possible (a key part of the scientific process)! It also doesn't mean that any time science has an answer that answer is correct, which is what most people believe. Very few scientists believe this, of course, since the
> One should question a political ideology lead by people who dismiss those with education.
I would question a political ideology that dismisses all those with educations.
On the other hand, a political ideology that dismisses certain sets of people with certain educations might make sense.
It's not clear to me whether you feel that "conservative pundits" fall in the former camp, or whether they fall in the latter and you have actually evaluated the educations of the people they are bashing.
My experience is that amongst people with a high level of education (PhD-level, say) there are plenty of people I wouldn't trust to make various decisions for me. Heck, some of them are pretty poor at making decisions for themselves. Education doesn't guarantee competence. Chekhov put it fairly well: "An education develops all of one's faculties, including foolishness and sloth." (My translation; can't find an "official" English version offhand).
At risk of Mr. Godwin interfering in this discussion, it's interesting to look up the education levels for the Waffen-SS. I am unable to find an online reference, sadly, and the real-world reference I saw was at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, but a fairly high percentage of the Waffen-SS officers held advanced degrees (much higher than in the army as a whole), and very few had no university diploma. The enlisted men were also very well educated. This had a lot to do with the unit's effectiveness, of course.
Even more simply, modern-day research has a major problem: you have to specialize very narrowly to achieve results. It's very easy to have someone who is an expert in their chosen field, but fairly clueless outside it. And "chosen field" is a very very narrow sliver of human experience in this case. "Climate science", for example, is far too wide for any single person to be an expert in it at this point, as is "Economics", "Sociology", "Mathematics", "Physics", and so forth. Of course any scientist worth anything (see points above) in any of these disciplines will know more than the man on the street about the basics of the discipline. But on fine points, outside their narrow specialty, they might not be much better off.
> You note correctly some of the issues with modern conservative politics, but modern > liberal/progressive politics as practiced on the Federal level is no better.
Or to put it more bluntly, both modern self-proclaimed conservatives and modern self-proclaimed liberals want to fuck over large but non-identical parts of this country's population, on average. Most screwed are those who lie in the intersection of the two sets, which this decade happens to be most of what was traditionally understood as "the middle class".
There are some people out there who actually live by what I would think of as conservative principles, just like there are people out there who practice an inclusive worldview and fact-based decision-making. Both are vanishingly small minorities, with little political impact in my experience. I'm pretty sure the number of such people I've personally met can be counted on my fingers. And no, I wouldn't put myself in either camp.
> An inclusive worldview and a fact-based decision-making methodology are embedded in the > foundation of progressivism.
Sorry, but that's not the case. Inclusive worldview, perhaps, though really only inclusive of those who agree with you; others can be tolerated as long as there is hope to educate them to agree with you. As practiced in the US today, even that tolerance is running thin.
But there's nothing fact-based in the decision-making methodology progressivism was founded with. There was plenty of religious feeling, and a good bit of the emotions that Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden" describes, albeit with education replacing race. Remember, one of the less-advertised successes of progressivism in the U.S. was Prohibition. There was a fair amount of dressing-up in fact-based guise going on there, but at heart it was people letting their inner Puritan loose.
You might argue that things have gotten better in the last 100 years in progressive-land, but I have some serious doubts to that effect. There is an incredible reliance on group-think, reliance on indiscriminate faith in "science" and "scientists" (and I say this as someone with a certain amount of scientific training), reliance on numbers without regard to how much they have been cooked. From where I stand it seems that a number of people lost faith in God and the Church and replaced it with faith in another set of organizations with inscrutable political infighting, priests, priestly robes (lab coats), dogma, and so forth. It's not clear to me that it's been much of a change for the better.
This is not to say that a lot of people don't do good science. It's just that even more do crap science, and most people can't tell the difference and don't want to try. They'd rather just believe (and send tax money towards) the scientists who confirm their preconceptions.
You note correctly some of the issues with modern conservative politics, but modern liberal/progressive politics as practiced on the Federal level is no better.
All that said, reality does have a well-known liberal bias if one doesn't look very closely. It also has a strong bias towards winners writing history. These things are not unrelated.
Coming back to our original topic, I don't believe anyone, including the Wikipedia folks, has ever accused them of "fact-based decision-making"....
I wonder how much of that is just different ethnic composition. For example, last I checked infant mortality for blacks in the US was higher than for whites (after controlling for socioeconomic status, of course). France is claimed to be about 93% French or other European, and as I recall it has one of the higher non-European minority populations in Europe. The US is between 66% and 74% white, depending on how one counts Hispanics (all numbers courtesy of Wikipedia, so take with a grain of salt).
Note that the ethnic composition can matter for whatever reasons: racism leading to poorer care, genetic differences, differences in the way the babies react to sunlight, differences in the way the parents react to sunspots, whatever. I have no idea why the differences are there, and it's not really relevant to the effect it has on the overall population numbers. It _is_ of course relevant to improving said overall numbers.;)
I'd be fairly interested in apples-to-apples comparisons of infant mortality (say minorities in the US vs minorities in France adjusted for socioeconomic status, same thing for non-minorities. Sadly, I suspect numbers of that sort are hard to come by...
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds good. Thank you for doing that!
You do realize that the people working on Ubiquity and the people working on something like the right-click issues you mention are different people with disjoint sets of skills, right?
There are always plenty of thing that need to be fixed. Should those have been worked on before performance improvements? Before support for new web standards? Before other things that need to be fixed?
Did you actually read through those bugs? What fraction are actually reproducible? What fraction are caused by the Flash plug-in?
Seriously, it's easy to say "just fix all the bugs", but in practice one ends up having to make tradeoffs in what one fixes and implementing new features to address changing user needs, to improve the user experience, and to stay relevant in the market (e.g. IE is implementing all sorts of web standards features all of a sudden; Gecko and webkit are implementing SMIL).
If you think something like ubiquity is "bloat" or distracts from work on other things, you should really take a hard look at SMIL. And unlike ubiquity, SMIL directly competes for core engine developer time.
Only the most recent three seem to still be stored on the crash server, and all three are indeed flash crashes.
We really need to move plug-ins out of process.
Those aren't crash bugs (which are what he was talking about), but cpu-hogging bugs (as you say).
That's quite a different thing, especially if the browser remains responsive during the period of high CPU usage. I'll note that you excluded the bugs where it doesn't ("hang" bugs), which are generally considered to matter more and hence get priority when being worked on.
If your point is that performance bugs in general should be worked on, sure. They are.
> Removing a feature for minimality of UI is wrong.
That really depends on how widely the feature is used and how much it impacts the UI.
> It is not like the only FF 2 was a bloat of UI.
I think the key here is that UI bloat must not increase. If something is added, something else needs to be removed.
Isn't the key difference here minimality of UI vs minimality of feature set?
Which bugs are we talking about here? I can probably give you a pretty good idea of whether the 3.1 betas fix them, if you don't want to test yourself.
I'd also appreciate a pointer to where Mozilla was promising specific fixes, actually.
You've been submitting the crash reports, right? Can you look at your about:crashes and point me to the relevant URIs? I'd love to see what I can do to get those issues fixed.
> But the reality is that the "barrier-to-entry", even into big industries like that,
> isn't as steep as you'd think
It's not the size of the industry that matters as much as the network effects and the regulatory burden of entry.
In a lot of industries, the barriers are much higher than they ought to be due to legislation lobbied for by the existing big players.
> they're not going to pay more than they can afford if they don't think they're going to
> get an acceptable amount of value for their payment
This doesn't seem to be empirically true.
> all make bad business decisions and hire over-valued, over-priced CEOs, then they'll
> pay the consequence of going out of business.
This is certainly empirically false for the financial industry, since they're being propped up so they won't go out of business.
Similar for the auto industry, to a lesser extent.
> My point is that successful companies cannot engage in a senseless "relentless wage
> spiral" for CEO compensation, and still remain in business.
As long as the government stays out of it, sure. But that's not happening.
> Look - if companies pay too much for chief executives because they're corrupt, or their
> board is somehow unduly influenced to overpay for leadership, they'll go out of
> business because there are innumerable other, leaner, less-stupid companies just raring
> to take their place as industry leaders. You can bank on that.
This assumes low enough barriers to entry and the ability of companies to actually fail. Both are false in a number of industries.
I have no problem with rational thought as long as you take into account all the facts. ;)
I didn't say that's all compensation consultants do. It _is_ what they do in the case of CEOs, by and large, and by and large companies operate as I described in many industries. Of course there are whole industries, and even individual companies in industries such as banking, that will in fact limit what they're willing to pay CEOs. That leaves a relentless wage spiral at the top, as I said.
I didn't say what they're doing is right. I just pointed out that the great-grandparent poster mis-characterizes what they did.
They didn't "sabotage" anything. They simply installed a system-wide extension. If it's not installed in the Firefox profile, Firefox can't very well remove it (especially if the user it's running as is not privileged).
Note that the "Disable" button works just fine, as it should. Had they really wanted to prevent this thing being disabled, they could have done that too, you know.
You could, but that would basically mean the system administrator can't make extensions available system-wide. A tradeoff, of course, and assumes that you trust your system administrator somewhat...
> If doctors were making insane amounts of money then more people would become doctors
That doesn't work, sadly. And the reason it doesn't work is that the AMA has a government-granted monopoly on deciding who can become a doctor. And they make sure that the supply is not too large. This is why medical school applications are on the rise without an increase in the number of graduates. This is also why doctors in hospitals end up with 80-hour workweeks. There's fundamentally a shortage of doctors in this country, and it's being perpetuated to keep up the incomes of the existing doctors (who are the ones who get to control how many new doctors there can be).
Lawyers are in a very similar situation, of course.
> Unless *every* single company is engaging in some sort of "CEO Salary collusion"
That's actually pretty much what's going on. CEO salaries are determined by CEO salary consultants, who base them on average CEO salaries plus a bit (to attract an above average CEO). The result is a relentless upward spiral of CEO salaries.
Some of the Mozilla folks have existing static analysis and automatic code rewriting hacks built on top of gcc. These could easily become plugins.
So think a compiler plugin which you can use to rename a function in your code. Or change the signature of a function. Or verify code-flow invariants.
It's also not a shipping browser, of course... yet.
> So your defense of anti-intellectualism amounts to the observation
> that deep knowledge requires specialization?
Excuse me? My defense of skepticism of authority, which is not the same thing, includes the observation that over-specialization means that you have to make very sure that the "expert" that you're listening to is an expert in the right thing. For the most part, such experts are fairly busy with their work, and the mouth-pieces are often not particularly expert.
> Some bad people have had good educations, and some good people have had terrible
> educations. Education is not character.
Indeed, though it's often treated interchangeably in the US nowadays. For example, a college education is used for character traits including the ability to actually perform a job well, with the result that a college education is required for many positions where it's not actually needed. It's just used as a first-cut weed-out tool.
> That does not invalidate the notion that those with an education are in general more
> competent in their chosen fields.
Agreed, but it also does not mean that all those within a given field are equally competent, nor does it mean that they are competent outside their chosen fields. I don't think anyone disputes the fact that Chomsky did excellent work in linguistics, say. It's his other endeavors people might not be convinced about.
> but you'd be a fool not to trust him in the area of his expertise
The problem is what to do when people with that area of expertise disagree or when there are significant biases in who is granted access to that area of expertise (e.g. refusing to publish certain classes of papers).
> Nobody is advocating putting rocket scientists in charge of mitigating climate change
> or vica versa. That strawman is implied by your discussion of specialization.
We have no problems with putting lawyers in charge of mitigating climate change; in fact we're doing so quite actively. But more to the point, I don't think there are many people out there, if any, who have a firm grasp of the entirety of our state of knowledge wrt climate science. A number of people have a very good idea of what's going on in their nook of the whole enterprise, synthesis is hard.
Rocket science is an interesting mention, since there's no way I'd want to put someone whos expertise lies in fluid dynamics in charge of the avionics. He might do fine on the engine, though. For most people, there's no difference, though, and they'll happily elect or appoint a "rocket scientist" to do either job.
> What's really happening is conservatism rejects education as a qualification
No, what's really happening is that part of the modern Republican party base, which calls themselves "conservative" in about the same way that East Germany called itself "democratic", rejects education as a qualification. At the same time, part of the Democratic party base elevates education to a wholly-undeserved pedestal. Both tendencies are bad. Both are encouraged by the respective parties in the interest of garnering votes.
> allowed the right to hold power over the last 30 years.
Uh... You mean those years when we had a Democratic president for 8 years and had majority-democratic congresses at various points in time?
I agree that the last 8 years have not been a good thing, but I will posit that any time the same party holds all three of House, Senate, and White House it's a bad thing.
Call me cynical if you will, but for both of the political parties the priorities are keeping the top priorities are keeping the two-party system in place and staying in power. All other considerations are secondary. Staying in power is justified by saying that otherwise other goals cannot be achieved, but since those goals are routinely sacrificed to staying in power, they don't get achieved anyway.
> imagining otherwise is conservative propaganda designed to keep people
> out of politics.
On the contrary, it's rational propaganda that should be getting people into politics in droves, and should be getting them to vote for third parties as much as the power structure allows (it's hard to do in Illinois, say, where there are structural impediments to even getting 3rd party candidates on the ballot). Unfortunately, most people seem to feel that this two-party thing we have going on is somehow good and like to cast things in terms of small contrasts between the two parties.
> The fact is that progressives do support a large, comfortable middle class
On the ground, yes. That's not what "progressive" politicians support, however, based on their voting records. For example, they routinely prefer what is usually called the upper-middle-class over what is usually called the lower-middle-class. This is pretty obvious if you look at the history of "free trade" agreements. Where's the free trade in medical services? Accounting? Legal services? There's trade in these ("medical tourism" as it's offhandedly labeled), but there are also government-granted certification monopolies that impose significant barriers on said trade.
> progressivism has always been about a quasiutilitarian idea of the greatest
> happiness for the greatest number
No, as far as I can tell it's been about "equal" happiness for everyone (less so in the US than in other places, granted). That's not at all the same thing.
> Kipling's heart was in the right place. The problem was his notion that there is an
> innate hierarchy of race, which is factually incorrect. However, educated societies are
> clearly better than ignorant ones. They have less political turmoil, and their
> inhabitants are happier and live longer.
The US has become much more educated, on average, in the last 50 years. While people do in fact live longer, there is, if anything, more political turmoil, and I'd question whether people are happier.
Even the rise in life expectancy is not necessarily caused by the rise in the the general level of education.
What you have here is a correlation of various things like political stability, increased life expectancy, and happiness with education (and not a very strong one for happiness). Let's not mistake that for causation. For example, political stability can well cause a more educated society, all else being equal, since the investment in education might make less sense in the face of political instabiity.
> Education isn't an innate characteristic like race; anyone can receive an education
That's true in a strict sense, but it's not true that anyone can receive any education. The latter interpretation is the one that people tend to use, and the resulting mess in the US with college education being diluted so as to make it possible for everyone to have a college degree, is one corllary...
> and it is certainly the responsibility of the educated to ensure that everyone has
> access to education.
Fully agreed. That does not give them leeway to write off those who either will not or cannot take advantage of that access.
> There is nothing morally questionable about that notion.
There is something morally questionable about any elitism, no matter how well-motivated.
> Why are you bringing religion into this?
Because that's what the progressive movement is: a religion. It doesn't involve a father-figure God, but it has dogma, it has a priesthood, it has believers, it has fanatics, it has intolerance of heritics... the whole deal.
> Frankly, if you can't see the difference between the rigor of science and the dogma of
> religion, why are you on a technology-oriented site?
_I_ can see the difference. Most people apparently can't, and many have simply transferred their faith and fanaticism from religion to science. This leads to the adoption of scientific dogma which is NOT a good thing for science. The effect is most pronounced in the sciences where controlled experiments are difficult to perform (e.g. the social sciences). Science is very difficult to do well even in the best of circumstances, and if there is significant pressure to publish only certain results, then those are the results that will be published. See http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22237 for a good description of what can happen to corrupt the scientific process when money and political influence are at stake, as they always are in the social sciences. Note in particular the identity of the author, and the paragraph containing "It is simply no longer possible to believe..."
> Science allows us to have the kind of lifestyle to which we are accustomed.
> Religion has no produced a shred of tangible progress in our knowledge of
> the world.
Yes, which is why I find it worrisome when science takes on more and more of the trappings of religion.
> There are overwhelming reasons to trust science in situations religion can't handle
There are overwhelming reasons to assume that science might be right and religion is probably wrong in many situations. That doesn't absolve one of responsibility for double-checking the science if possible (a key part of the scientific process)! It also doesn't mean that any time science has an answer that answer is correct, which is what most people believe. Very few scientists believe this, of course, since the
> One should question a political ideology lead by people who dismiss those with education.
I would question a political ideology that dismisses all those with educations.
On the other hand, a political ideology that dismisses certain sets of people with certain educations might make sense.
It's not clear to me whether you feel that "conservative pundits" fall in the former camp, or whether they fall in the latter and you have actually evaluated the educations of the people they are bashing.
My experience is that amongst people with a high level of education (PhD-level, say) there are plenty of people I wouldn't trust to make various decisions for me. Heck, some of them are pretty poor at making decisions for themselves. Education doesn't guarantee competence. Chekhov put it fairly well: "An education develops all of one's faculties, including foolishness and sloth." (My translation; can't find an "official" English version offhand).
At risk of Mr. Godwin interfering in this discussion, it's interesting to look up the education levels for the Waffen-SS. I am unable to find an online reference, sadly, and the real-world reference I saw was at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, but a fairly high percentage of the Waffen-SS officers held advanced degrees (much higher than in the army as a whole), and very few had no university diploma. The enlisted men were also very well educated. This had a lot to do with the unit's effectiveness, of course.
Even more simply, modern-day research has a major problem: you have to specialize very narrowly to achieve results. It's very easy to have someone who is an expert in their chosen field, but fairly clueless outside it. And "chosen field" is a very very narrow sliver of human experience in this case. "Climate science", for example, is far too wide for any single person to be an expert in it at this point, as is "Economics", "Sociology", "Mathematics", "Physics", and so forth. Of course any scientist worth anything (see points above) in any of these disciplines will know more than the man on the street about the basics of the discipline. But on fine points, outside their narrow specialty, they might not be much better off.
> You note correctly some of the issues with modern conservative politics, but modern
> liberal/progressive politics as practiced on the Federal level is no better.
Or to put it more bluntly, both modern self-proclaimed conservatives and modern self-proclaimed liberals want to fuck over large but non-identical parts of this country's population, on average. Most screwed are those who lie in the intersection of the two sets, which this decade happens to be most of what was traditionally understood as "the middle class".
There are some people out there who actually live by what I would think of as conservative principles, just like there are people out there who practice an inclusive worldview and fact-based decision-making. Both are vanishingly small minorities, with little political impact in my experience. I'm pretty sure the number of such people I've personally met can be counted on my fingers. And no, I wouldn't put myself in either camp.
> An inclusive worldview and a fact-based decision-making methodology are embedded in the
> foundation of progressivism.
Sorry, but that's not the case. Inclusive worldview, perhaps, though really only inclusive of those who agree with you; others can be tolerated as long as there is hope to educate them to agree with you. As practiced in the US today, even that tolerance is running thin.
But there's nothing fact-based in the decision-making methodology progressivism was founded with. There was plenty of religious feeling, and a good bit of the emotions that Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden" describes, albeit with education replacing race. Remember, one of the less-advertised successes of progressivism in the U.S. was Prohibition. There was a fair amount of dressing-up in fact-based guise going on there, but at heart it was people letting their inner Puritan loose.
You might argue that things have gotten better in the last 100 years in progressive-land, but I have some serious doubts to that effect. There is an incredible reliance on group-think, reliance on indiscriminate faith in "science" and "scientists" (and I say this as someone with a certain amount of scientific training), reliance on numbers without regard to how much they have been cooked. From where I stand it seems that a number of people lost faith in God and the Church and replaced it with faith in another set of organizations with inscrutable political infighting, priests, priestly robes (lab coats), dogma, and so forth. It's not clear to me that it's been much of a change for the better.
This is not to say that a lot of people don't do good science. It's just that even more do crap science, and most people can't tell the difference and don't want to try. They'd rather just believe (and send tax money towards) the scientists who confirm their preconceptions.
You note correctly some of the issues with modern conservative politics, but modern liberal/progressive politics as practiced on the Federal level is no better.
All that said, reality does have a well-known liberal bias if one doesn't look very closely. It also has a strong bias towards winners writing history. These things are not unrelated.
Coming back to our original topic, I don't believe anyone, including the Wikipedia folks, has ever accused them of "fact-based decision-making"....
I wonder how much of that is just different ethnic composition. For example, last I checked infant mortality for blacks in the US was higher than for whites (after controlling for socioeconomic status, of course). France is claimed to be about 93% French or other European, and as I recall it has one of the higher non-European minority populations in Europe. The US is between 66% and 74% white, depending on how one counts Hispanics (all numbers courtesy of Wikipedia, so take with a grain of salt).
Note that the ethnic composition can matter for whatever reasons: racism leading to poorer care, genetic differences, differences in the way the babies react to sunlight, differences in the way the parents react to sunspots, whatever. I have no idea why the differences are there, and it's not really relevant to the effect it has on the overall population numbers. It _is_ of course relevant to improving said overall numbers. ;)
I'd be fairly interested in apples-to-apples comparisons of infant mortality (say minorities in the US vs minorities in France adjusted for socioeconomic status, same thing for non-minorities. Sadly, I suspect numbers of that sort are hard to come by...