Day: November 2, 2022

The Osterman Weekend, 1983 film, based on the Robert Ludlum novel: “Think of them [murdered people] as fleas on a dog hit by a car driven by a drunken teenager whose girlfriend just gave him the clap.  It will help your sense of perspective.”

Brown University economics prof, Emily Oster, has penned a plea for COVID sanity in The Atlantic.

I had to hold back the tears.

Emily’s words are like gravel spread over slats covering a 1000-foot-deep sinkhole. Force yourself to read them anyway:

[…]

And on every [COVID] topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.

[…]

In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.

[…]

Student test scores have shown historic declines, more so in math than in reading, and more so for students who were disadvantaged at the start. We need to collect data, experiment, and invest. Is high-dosage tutoring more or less cost-effective than extended school years?

[…]

Many people have neglected their health care over the past several years. Notably, routine vaccination rates for children (for measles, pertussis, etc.) are way down. Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up. Pediatricians and public-health officials will need to work together on community outreach, and politicians will need to consider school mandates.

The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

O the humanity.

There is an old saw among contemporary professors: “All of Western philosophy is footnotes on Plato.”

Plato is the first serious philosopher in the West. He pushed his intellectual position to the limit. Through the main character in his astounding dialogues, Socrates, he tried to prove that ideas must have an absolutist foundation. Which is to say, argument and debate must be resolved, and in one way only. By perceiving an Ideal Form of the concept under debate.

Socrates’ antagonists were willing to settle for far less, so Socrates showed them the error of their ways.

Take the idea called JUSTICE. What is it? Plato went the distance. He claimed that justice must exist somewhere, somehow, in another realm, in a perfected form. Otherwise, humans would not be able to see shadows and half-formed versions of it.

That’s a titanic leap.

With justice and all such vital ideas, Plato’s solution was the same. There is another realm where these ideas exist in their perfect majesty.

And those few men who are capable must access that realm AND rule civilization.

When you analyze Plato’s position, you see he is trying to solve the problem of cause and effect. For him, it is impossible to consider that people are struggling to define and clarify JUSTICE on their own and fight for it against the forces of evil. That’s not enough. That can’t be true. Because where are humans getting their clues about justice in the first place? What causes humans to be able to envision justice?

The true first causes must be coming from somewhere else. And that place must be a final place. A first cause, beyond which there is nowhere to go. Where the chain of cause and effect stops.

Aristotle would later call it THE UMOVED MOVER.

I completely disagree.

(This article is Part-3 in a series. For Part-2, click here.)

If a tweet falls in the forest…

And 10 million people read it or know what it said…

And the tweet was written by the richest man in the world who is VERY famous…

And he happens to own the company-of-all-tweets, Twitter…

And he directed his tweet at one of the most well-known women in the world…

And the substance of the tweet (true or false) was highly explosive…

And related to a very hot current new story that is being used to promote more censorship and labeling of people as inciters of violence…

And this tweet directly challenged this current hot news story and cast it in a completely different light…

Do you think this tweet might have a significant effect in the culture war and the information war? Possibly, say, an anti-censorship effect and a “pressuring” effect on the scum of the earth mainstream news media?